President Jagdeo:

Delegates, observers, guests, special invitees, our large numbers here today sends an unequivocal message to this country, that we remain strong and untied as a political party, that we are up to the task ahead of us and that we are the only national party in Guyana today. Our congress has always been a reservoir, a reservoir of commitment, ideas, discussions which we all come to from time to time to replenish ourselves and reenergize ourselves and I have no doubt that this congress will fulfill that expectation.
Comrades, it give me a great pride to be part of this collective, to be one of you. Yesterday I came over on the ferry and when I arrived at the ferry, many people were stuck there for six, seven hours, some of our comrades coming from different part of the country, who been travelling for almost a day and a half were stuck there. And I went around saying to people, apologizing to them that this shouldn't happen and they said to me that it's okay. It was their spirit that made me proud, the courage, the hardship they were facing, yet they had a very high spirit and that characterizes this Party, characterizes our people. But the reason I say that we are the only national Party, is on that boat, you had people from the Waini and from Mabaruma, Mourca, and the Pomeroon and from Hogg Island and Wakenaam, and Leguan and the West Coast and of course Essequibo, from Arora and other places. And we have people here from Linden, Region Four and Region Five and Region Six and Kamarang and Bartica, Coppinan and Madhia, Ishalton and the whole country. Which other Party could match the spread of the PPP. None today, none of them can do that, and you know why this is so, because we believe in all the people of this country and that is the philosophy that Cheddi Jagan laid down for this Party and that is the philosophy that will continue to drive the PPP through our years ahead.
Comrades, today we are gathered here, I want to recall the story of a young America woman who got married to a poor Dentist in Chicago and she followed him to his country. A country that was still under colonial bondage at that time and he had was a small dental practice and a burning desire to see his country free. And she stood by his side through the difficult times and through the good times and she faced in her own right, prison harassment and even treats to her life and this is all for her adopted home and for the past five decades she remain faithful to her country and inspite of attempts to vilify her when she became President of this country, she stood proud and tall. She was there from the beginning, from the conceptualization to the formation of our party and all through the years and she has never missed a congress before, and today as we are gathered here, she is sitting alone at home - and I know how she must feel but we can send her a message, a message that is important that one we appreciate her struggles for the freedom of this country and we miss her and the second message, the best message that we can send to Janet Jagan, is that her Party, Cheddi Jagan Party, the people's party will remain strong, united, and be able to lead the future of the country.
Comrade I want us to stand and ensure that Janet Jagan hears this in Georgetown, her Party is strong and united and all the delegates of her party are here today, all of them are here. Thank you comrades.
I also want to pay tribute to the many, many comrades who have struggled for this party to be where it is today. Cheddi Jagan had faithful people by his side and I know, I have been in the party for 22 years and in addition to that I been three years in the PYO. And when I came in I saw many of these comrades who are have been in the party another 20 years before. I met them there, and I don't want us to pay tribute to them only when they passed on, I think we should pay tribute to them here today, and say that we appreciate your struggles for the freedom this country too. Many of them are seated among us and many of them are here and many of them are standing there and seated out there too. And many of them may not have come to this congress. They may not have positions, they may not hold a position in the Central Committee or in the Government, but they may be helping to clean the yard for congress, but their contribution is ***, we must value their contributions and it is equivalent to any contribution.
Comrades, today we have an opportunity and over the next few days, a party people we have an opportunity to speak frankly to each other, to review our task, to review the challenges we are facing, and set new tasks for the future and we would do that in our own way and freely and not to worry about those who were so concerned about democracy in our party, it is alive and well and strong within this party. You don't need to worry about our party and democracy within it. It is strong, because none of you would be mussel, you would be free to express your thinking and that has been our tradition and we will maintain it, that is the essence of the PPP and we are one family.
We must remain committed to one thing and that is the original ideal of this party and since its formation we have one objective and whatever we discuss and whatever tactical/ strategic issues were come up with, they must all be geared towards that one objective and the objective is simple, a better life for every Guyanese regardless of class, race, religion, anything, that is what we are about.
Comrades, today people are saying why you looking back at the past, why do you want to go back to 28 years, lets talk about the future, and we don't look back at the past to remain stuck in the pass because we are not that type of people, but for analytical reasons we have to do so, but many of them do not want the young people of this country to remember the past and in many cases our young people do not know of that past. And we must remind them of the past sometimes because in trying to get us to forget where we come from they are trying to diminish our achievements and we haven't made many achievements and sometimes we forget those achievements. You know what we have done in this country, in 1992 when Cheddi Jagan won the election after hard years of struggle, we restored hope to this country. We restored pride to people's life, we restored freedom, our children could have walked with their heads held high and sometimes, people can't measure that in a material sense, you can't fill a cup and say it is half fill, but what is inside. Without that atmosphere, that climate, without this being restored to people, dignity to their daily lives you can achieve nothing, but on the material side also we have restored hope to our country. We have transformed this nation, you know, we go back to the debt, every child was born in a debt burden, even if that child work all his/her life that child would not have been able to repay the debt. The debt on a per capita basis, we have taken that burden away from the future generation of this country, so every child that is born now into this country, doesn't have to worry about paying the debts of the past because at one time people were eating more than what we are producing. Living above our means, we have returned that to this country. We have repaid G$100 million in foreign debts and we have slashed our debts by half and we have invested more into our economy. It’s a huge achievement, very few countries have done this, yet many of our Comrades pay slight heed to it because they don't see it as an achievement. We don't see these things as an achievement and opposition wants us to forget that period. They want us to forget that period when it was usual for rats to eat out babies’ toes in the Georgetown Hospital; they want us to forget it, because people then would not have a sense of the past. And then when we don't fix two hospitals across the country or five hospitals don't have drugs, then they would say, look how things are bad, but if you know where we are coming from, you would see that things are bad today but we have made progress. Progress is a process, we have moved forward. We haven't achieved what we wanted to as yet. We still have along way to go but we are on the right path. They want us to forget that at one time, people couldn't speak freely in the country, today we have a wildness in the media, racism, some people promoting in some parts of the country, but we have restored people's right to speak and not to worry about it and these are huge, huge freedoms. Many people, the young ones today, complains about some of the situation that we are faced with, and I say to them ask your parents about the struggles that we have gone through and if you think that things are bad today then they would tell you what they had to face to get to this stage in this country, so let us not as a party forget our own achievements and we must make sure that the older ones, that we keep this alive in the minds of the young people, not in the sense for them to be stuck there but for them to understand that since this party took office ten years ago, in spite of the most difficult environment, in spite of the international environment being harsh, in spite of the constant aggression by the PNC and by their attempts to sabotage progress, our party has made significant signal achievements and you must be proud of that, because you have contributed to that.
The young Amerindian here, they would tell you that in the Amerindian communities, the children there never had access to secondary education, today we are fighting to put secondary education in almost all of the regions, we are giving secondary education to Amerindian children. In Region Ten, the investment that we have made into education at the schools and the infrastructure would testify to that. In Berbice here, if you walk up just down the road you would see a University campus here. So that the children in Berbice and in Regions Five, for the first time now have access to university education, that they would have never had access to because there parents are too poor to send them to Georgetown. If you go to the Essequibo coast, you would see a new technical institute there, recently there, those students would have never been able to access to education. There are hundreds of these examples and sometimes we take them for granted, but they came from the sweat and hard work of comrades like you. People all across this country and we must be proud of those things too and we must make sure that we advocate on behalf of them.
Comrades, we face a difficult international environment, today there has been relentless pursuits of **** and in many ways, this has led to increase financial crisis. Every minute you read the newspapers or look at the television you see one crisis or another in some part of the world and why is this so? It is because of this mad push towards free markets and liberalizing the financial sector has been done without regards to regulatory systems, without regards to sequencing, political context etc. so what we have is one crisis after another, and these crises are not confined to one country, they spill over into other countries. What are the remedies? Some countries get some contingent line of credit, like Turkey from the IMF and others melt down like Argentina….tape end……because we are commodity producing countries, so everything that we export would have to go into that trading environment , our bauxite, sugar, rice, rum, copra, everything else.
And that environment is not very favourable because there has been a dismantling of preferences, there is double standards in the dealing of the WTO and we need a *** to push for systems that will allow us to survive, a system that take account of the different size of various countries so that these processes are not marginalized further and pushed into the periphery of the world economy and this is why we have a major collation with many like minded countries, especially within CARICOM to press for particular forms of organisation of trade within the WTO,FTA and the ACP/EU arrangements.
Today, we have the MFI's not even democratic enough, not responsive enough to the call of many of their borrowers. We need to fight to change that system to democratize these institutions. The debt burden is till very rampant although there has been many declarative statements internationally about how much they want to give to poor developing countries. These things have not materialized in many cases. September 11 terrorists attack, devastating attack, disgusting attack, and we lost many of our people in that attack. That incident on the USA had shifted international assistance from development issues to security issues, this must not happen. There must be resources for both, because concerns are valid. These are things comrades, as a party, as Cheddi Jagan's party, we must keep in mind, that the world environment within which we operate.
The good feature about the international environment, though is increasingly within the OAS we had the *** Democratic Charter, within CARICOM, within the FTA they have the democracy clause and almost all the international organisations that we subscribe to, people and these organisation have come to recognise that democracy must be *** and reserved in countries and this is why you have seen a strong condemnation from CARICOM when we had a few people trying to reverse the democratic process in this country and that is a good feature of the international environment and we must work towards it. We must take up the call once more for the New Human Global Order and we must pursue it, its being done now within the UN because that's a system, that's an order that focuses more on a shift from confrontation to collaboration and partnership and that is what we need in the international community today.
Locally we have major problems, we have seen since 1997, an increasing unwillingness of the opposition to accept the result of the elections. Although these elections were observed and announced free and fair by international community. We have seen where increasingly, the opposition is using spurious arguments, arguments that people are being discriminated against or that we are practicing racism to mobilize and mislead people, but comrades our record is very clear, our record is very, very clear and we must be much more aggressive on putting this record to the Guyanese people, because since the PPP/C took office, in fact when we were in the opposition we *** from the formation of the party, believe in a multi racial, multi ethnic, multi cultural Guyana, that;s the kind of country we want to build.
In 1965, after we had some of the worst troubles in this country, Cheddi Jagan gave a speech committing him self to a multi ethnic Guyana and our party to a strong policy to fight racism.
In the 25th congress this is what he said, "we do not share the view that politics in Guyana is cast in rigid racial ethnic compartments and allegiants would never change." It is the history of our party, from 1992 we have shown that every single community has benefitted in Guyana and Afro Guyanese, Indo Guyanese, Amerindians, every single groups have benefitted. We have the facts and figures to show this. The PNC cannot confront that, they cannot confront that they pauperized the public servant. The fact that they made nurses, teachers, and policemen fall from the middle class into the ranks of the poor, but we had can show that that happened and we can show that we reversed the process and we can show that people's wages and salaries, although it is still not that adequate, we have seen a climb out of that status of poverty. We can show that and we can show that our houselot development programme. Where did this land come from, did it fall from the sky suddenly in 1992 and fell into the laps of the PPP? The land was there all the time, for close to 30 years the PNC were in Government and they didn't see it fit to give the land to ordinary Guyanese, some of there clonies got land. Today one man is fighting in Georgetown to get a piece of land. He bought it for $2 million from Hoyte in 1989, you know how much he wants for it now, he wants us to buy it from him for $700 million. But let me tell you, this gentleman was in the committee for the reelection of President Hoyte at that time, that is what they did with the land, not ordinary Indo Guyanese or Amerindian or the ordinary Afro Guyanese got the land, the elite, some of there friends, but today they are very upset, they are upset because they want to control the land distribution committee in Region Ten. They want Region Ten, but you know what they will do if they control it, they would stop issuing land there and then they are going to say that the Government is discriminating, because the people in Region Six is getting and Region Ten is not. That's what they want to do but we can't allow them to succeed, we have to continue with our policy of land distribution and it is fair and we have documentation to prove that that is so, but they cannot face that fact, they can't face it, because it goes all against their arguments that we are discriminating and we are racists. If they look around this same crowd here we had some of the largest groups in the country in the areas that were traditional PNC areas.
After the 1997 and 2001elections who do you think they kidnapped and took to Congress Place, some of our black comrades, they kidnapped them, took them and interrogated them at Congress Place because they dare to cross the divide and we don't see any divide and we are going to work hard to ensure that one day 90 percent of this country becomes PPP. So what they have been doing, they have been mobilizing on *** charges and they can find a lot of young people and mislead them and they can mobilize some criminal elements and that has created mayhem in some parts of Guyana, because when you have a philosophy of violence and terror as a means of winning power added to the increase to criminal activities it's a lethal combination and it makes it ten times harder to fight, because political cover is given to pure outright criminals. That's the kind of environment we have to face, but our party has never been unfamiliar with these tactics. We have always faced the front of repressing tactics and we not only, **** the seal was forged along time ago and we are strong and we will continue because they have an aim and what maybe the aim. Many people speculating today and they say that they maybe hoping that since Indo Guyanese is the target of most of this violence, they may hope that you may have a mass migration out of the country and therefore enhance their pre- electoral process or this could be a ploy to destroy the economy because once you have political turmoil then you may not be able to attract investments and create jobs for young people and you can't get enough revenue to move the country forward. And people speculate and I think it is a combination of both, but this Congress, here when we move away from the opening session, we will sit and discuss these matters and we must explore strategies and solutions and how we are going to deal with these issues, as a party today here. And we must make sure that whatever comes out of it, that we **** violence as a form of solving problems. We have always believed in dialogue, it's not because its our nature, but it is the only solution in the world. Today you have major conflict between Palestine and Israel, Israel occupied the Palestinians land for a very long time. The Palestine people **** a struggle for a homeland, but hundreds of people are dying and at the end of the day, the only way they would find a solution is at the table. That's the only way. So we are committed to dialogue but we must not misinterpret dialogue and its inclusivity, for power sharing at the level of the executives and many of our comrades misinterpret that, that dialogue and inclusivity means power sharing at the executive.
Firstly, I have never seen any example of power sharing in the Cabinet that works. I have not seen any example that works and I am very open to that, to look at that, they tried it in South Africa and it failed and even in Ireland where you had the USA and Britain participating in the *** of this arrangement, it collapse. It doesn't work in many cases; so many people try to say that the new Constitution and I have seen it recently, talked about shared governance. The new Constitution spoke about shared Governance, of course but the shared Governance that is meant by the new Constitution is enshrined in the changes that we made to the Constitution. And what are those changes, we have established five or six commissions: Commissions on Human Rights, Indigenous people, a commission on Gender and Equity, a procurement commission, an ethnic relations commission. We set up four sub committees of the Parliament- Sectoral committees, one on human right on social affairs, on foreign affairs and economic affairs; we have now expanded the service commissions to have a parliamentary input. We have limited the powers of the President, that's what we mean by shared governance in the Constitutional sense. So it must not be misinterpreted, and many of our comrades must not be confused, because there is so much confusion today, that it is weaning, that is sends very mix signals to our comrades. I meet people from time to time and they are not clear on what the position of the Party is and let me tell you what my position is. My position is that is the concept of shared Governance that we have subscribed to until this point in time and if that is the situation you will have to decide.
You the delegates and the people of this party will have to decide on that. We support a good society. I believe strongly in civil society. Civil society has a very important role to play the Churches. We need to embrace them as our partners, private sector, labour all of these sectors have an interest in this country too and we must work with them. Of course we must also make sure that there is no back door entrance to power. Power must come from the people of this country.
What are the tasks ahead Comrades, the tasks ahead I think are simple but very difficult. I have seen the General Secretary’s Report and he has outlined clearly some of these tasks. I want us to focus maybe on just some of them. I think our first task ahead is to keep our young people employed and away from the extremists that is employment creation in this country. In spite of the political climate and the deliberate attempt to keep investors away from Guyana we must find ways to ensure that we expand the employment base of this country and reduce poverty.
The second task is to move ahead with Education. Education is the key to the future of this country. It can take people out of Poverty. The world today puts a premium to education, but education must not be expanded only in the formal sense of the world where we just look at it in an academic way that is Universal Secondary Education, expanding tech-voc education to all parts of the country, giving assess to tertiary education, training more teachers etc. we must look at it in a different way. Our people must be educated so they can be all rounded so that they can understand and reject some of these actives to shift them Away from productive activities. Our education must focus on pride in our country, we must teach our young people pride in our country. They must understand diversity; although we look different we all have the same dreams and aspirations for our children. They must learn to respect elders, they must learn to create not destroy. They must understand personal responsibility and responsibility for families. They must learn to think for themselves, that’s the kind of education system that we have to build.
The third area is fulfilling our country’s basic needs, water, telecommunication, electricity, all are very important, we must continue our programmes in these areas.
We must make sure that we have a better quality of health care, that is the forth point, health care that focuses more on personalized care, expanding it across the country, decentralizing. Housing, housing is not just the physical process of transferring a piece of land from the Government to a person or maybe giving some more assets from the state to individuals. With housing comes hope, I’ve seen how young people who would have been on a different path how their lives changed because they simply got a plot of land. Housing has the ability to create dignity in people’s lives. I remember when I was Minister of Finance, there was a guard stationed there, a young Afro-Guyanese Comrade and he said to me, you know I use to go out and lime every day but now I got a piece of land and every afternoon that I go home I build four or five concrete blocks, because he bought some cement and a load of sand and he build four or five blocks and he said that in a year’s time he would have enough blocks to start my home and he changed almost his whole life. He started thinking differently; we have to continue to focus on housing as an important way forward.
To strengthen security, we must not only strengthen the Police Force and the Army, to defend people and our sovereignty. We must also urge our comrades and businessmen and people all around this country to be more security conscious, we have to prepare them to defend themselves and to defend democracy and I hope that we can spend some time discussing this issue.
Comrades we must fight corruption in all its forms. Corruption today, today people say that the Government corrupt and I say to them that of course there is corruption, and I am the last person to deny that there is corruption, but you don’t expect we the political directorate to answer for 30,000 employees. I can’t tell you whether the Customers Officer would be stealing. I would never put my neck on the line for them…. Blackout………. I was just going to ask if we have a customs officer in the house. Well Comrade I am saying that we must not be on the defensive on this matter, because it is another plan for the PNC to mobilize on. If we as a party, as a government, we have relentlessly fought against corruption. The mere fact that you have an audit report today in Guyana that audits every cent of spending, it’s a huge achievement for this country and this Government. I said a few minutes ago to the Auditor General, because he is going on secondment to, I think it’s **. I said to him what happened in 1992, you have the same Accountant General, the same staff in the Ministry of Finance, but for ten years before that they couldn’t produce statements of the Government Accounts to be audited. After 1992, the same Accountant General, the same staff, they started producing these statements so it couldn’t be that the technical people did want to do it. It is just that they were prevented to do it by the politicians, because they didn’t want the accounts audited. And we managed to do that every single year that we are in Office, so we must be proud of that Comrade. Today, two years ago we passed the Integrity Commission. We set up an integrity commission where you have Bishop Randolph George heading the Integrity Commission and you have a representative of the Hindu and Muslim communities and every member of the Cabinet and every Member of Parliament (MP) from the PPP/C have submitted there statements of income and assets to the Integrity Commission. But I saw some of the PNC MPs don’t want to. Imagine they are in the Opposition and they do not want to submit their statements of income and asset, much less if they were in Government. Comrades we must never ever be on the defensive on these matters. We have all the material, we have worked hard and corruption is still here but we have worked hard to clean it up.
At Customs we put in place a Revenue Authority with the ability to hire and fire because when we had to go to the Public Service Commission, we catch someone stealing and we can’t fire them. Recently we fired some people from the Courts, the registry and they were reinstated. But we must never be on the defensive and we must make sure that as Party Comrades too we lead by example, we lead by example, we can’t be practicing corruption if we want to fight corruption. Comrades we must consistently, another point we must consistently project this image that we will always fight for every Guyanese and that this Party welcomes everyone, all people all races. We must constantly project that image, in our daily utterances. People must see us as different from the others, they must see us as different from the narrow minded Opposition, PNC and other groups with their small babies Parties around this country, who constantly are at a race. We are above that; we are bigger than that we are the party for the whole country and that is the image we should project and every one of you. Everyone one of you must have that obligation in your daily life, support that image; because we are a party with a difference, we are Cheddi Jagan’s Party.
Comrades, we must, I always hear talk about old and new, and old people and young people in this Party and people are trying to create divisions among us. It must never be, we should recognize *** you should see the newspaper articles trying to create problems among us. All of our leaders here are united they stand strongly together and all those artificial divisions that out side forces are trying to create they don’t exist. Let me tell you that, so don’t worry with the newspaper, we are strong and united, we are a team, we are a team and don’t let anyone try to create those divisions. We need everyone in this Party, old, young, farmers, workers, intellectuals, and every single person. That is the kind of party we are.
Comrades we must fight for the New Global Human Order too. These are some of the things that we have to come out of this Congress subscribing to, but accomplishing these tasks we need to do things. We need to forge alliances; we need to tap the international community. We have had a lot of friends from abroad. We have difficulties with many of these countries, but we also received a lot of help from them and we must not be ungrateful, from the USA and from Canada, UK, we received a lot of help from these countries and we must seek to engage them in constructive partnerships.
Cuba is represented here, Cuba has given us…….. I went to Cuba and President Castro was generous to give us 350 scholarships. This year 124 students are going to leave Guyana for Cuba to study, 70 odd of them in medicine and these are Guyanese from every corner of this country, some of them would have never have had a chance to study or become a Doctor or an Engineer or anything else, because they are poor. That’s the kind of Party we are and we are also thankful to the Government for that. We must work with our religious leaders from the Muslims and the Hindus and the Christian communities. We have a lot of good progressive leaders who can improved that role in moving this country forward and we must work hand in hand with them. We must work with people from other sections of civil society, who wants to see this country move forward, who rejects violence as a method of solving problems those are our alias. We must forge other kind of alliances too, within CARICOM and with other countries to push for discrete tasks. We must continue in our participatory processes - the National Development Strategy, our PRSP, the Constitutional changes, these were all very participatory processes. We made a participatory democracy, we believe in that, that’s in our documents and we must be able to engage people through these consultations and participatory process so people understand what we are about and what our Party is about, what we are about but at the same time they get to share their views with us. We can learn also from these people. We as Party members must prepare our selves, and I can go around in many cases, Party members do not even know what the Government is doing and that could be a failing on the part of the Government itself that we are not sharing enough information, that way we may be failing, but how can we defend this party and how can we defend our policies and how can we say to people that we are a party of all the people and that we are not racists, we don’t discriminate, if we don’t have the facts and figure ourselves. And many of our Comrades, because they are not prepared to defend those little things they try to move away from people, we don’t participate enough in the communities. We don’t take a leadership position; we must prepare ourselves, Comrades. We must all leave here, every single one of us with a strong commitment that we go back and we study these issues and we make sure that whenever they come up we be in the forefront in giving leadership and defending the positions of the party.
Many people are concerned about the ideology of our party, they say Marxist, Leninist, Socialist, whether we are something else. And they are trying to create division in the Party because this, these outside forces. Well as I said before we remain strong and united here, because we know what we are about and we know the kind of society we want to build and it was clearly put. It has always been in our documents, if you check our Central Committee report you would see this. From the beginning of the PPP, from its formation we said we are a party and we want to build a better life for people of all races. We firmly on the side of the people of the working……………tape end………political democracy social justice. It unites farmers, businessmen, workers, professional and intellectuals in a broad alliance, which allows for the satisfaction of the interest of these various groups. It prevents the dominance of any class or strata and in turn protects each from being crushed. Now this is the kind of state we are trying to build where everyone have a place. Every single one and do not get side tracked by those who are leading or trying, those people outside of this party who have other kinds of motives try to create confusion in our ranks. We have clarity on the kind of society we are trying to build.
Comrades, what are my expectations of this Congress, that one we come out as a stronger and more united party; that we will strengthen our commitment to national unite; that we will continue to fight poverty and enhance economic and social conditions in Guyana and that we forge alliances, international and local in this task.
Comrades, our Congress must send strong signals of hope and confidence in the future of our country and our people. Long live the people of Guyana, long live the PPP, and long live Cheddi Jagan’s Party.