The PPP had a public meeting around 5pm on Wednesday, April 1, at Cotton Field on the Essequibo Coast, about 100 feet away from my house. There were three speakers, namely, President Donald Ramotar, the General Secretary of the Guyana Rice Producers’ Association and a former organizer of the PPP. The meeting was poorly attended by people from the village, which can be considered a PPP stronghold. I was expecting a large crowd since it was the President of Guyana speaking on the political platform. In 1997, I was the chairman for a public meeting which was held by the PPP at this same venue. It was a mammoth crowd which attracted about 3,000 people from near and far.

As soon as the President took the podium talking for 20 minutes, he was greeted with a sudden blackout which lasted for 2 hours until he left for another meeting at Devonshire Castle. It was thanks to a businessman’s floodlight that he was helped to get his message across to the small crowd. Two days earlier I had predicted that he might be greeted with a blackout and he would know what Essequibians are going through when there are prolonged power outages.

Twenty-two years and several general elections have established certain basic facts. Given the low turnout at this very important and crucial meeting, the PPP is losing support from all indications. Apart from a conflict at the leadership level, there are growing contradictions between the PPP leadership and the rank-and-file as a result of corruption. The small crowd came to hear how the President was going to address the shortage of qualified doctors and drugs at all health centres, as well as the Charity and Suddie hospitals; joblessness; unbridled privatization; prudent management of our scarce resources; lack of institutional and administrative capacity in the region; runaway inflation; and the constant blackouts.

Instead, all the speakers continued to attack the opposition; it looked like they had nothing new to tell the people about how they will fix Guyana’s problems. Many Essequibians are living below the poverty line; a large percentage are jobless; there is a heavy brain drain; and nothing about programmes and policies was mentioned. The President did acknowledge that the rice industry was indeed facing a serious crisis and he would fix it. As a rice farmer and former rice extension officer, I couldn’t understand the logic of how he intended to fix it. He went on to say that he will increase the extension services by fixing the drainage and irrigation problems. What about the cost of production? Nothing was mentioned about how he would reduce that and raise the price for paddy.

Anyone who works in the extension services will tell you that drainage and irrigation has nothing to do with extension services; this is a service which is provided by trained and qualified officers in the field and their main objective is to evaluate the new rice varieties, meet with farmers at farm school and educate them on how to cut costs and increase production. Such officers are concerned with agronomy, entomology and plant pathology. What the industry needs at the present moment is an ITEC specialist. The President also went on to talk about a new fertilizer; the only fertilizers I know of are nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium and NPK which is a mixture of all the fertilizers.

I could hear some quiet heckling from a group of young boys, saying ‘time to go, enough is enough, we need jobs, not fair promises.’ There are many problems facing Essequibians. And they must be addressed. They must be neither underestimated nor overestimated. They must not be swept under the carpet on the pretence that all is well here in this region. I personally feel that this election campaign should be focused on uniting the 6 races and moving Guyana forward, rather than attacking opponents and slandering their characters as was done at this public meeting.

Yours faithfully,

Mohamed Khan