President Granger And Opposition Leader Bharat Jagdeo Hold Talks

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, CMC – The main opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) is assuring the David Granger administration that it will provide unqualified support to the government in the border dispute with Venezuela.

Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo met with President Granger on Monday night and later told reporters “the President presented me with an agenda on issues that they would wish to discuss with us and one of the issues was the border matter and I said to him that I can give him an early position that it’s not partisan and we will support the government fully on border-related issues, the defence of our territorial integrity”.

On Monday, President Granger held talks with a delegation from the United Nations on  seeking a solution to the border dispute between his country and Venezuela.

“We are really here to inform ourselves of the views of the governments and their views on the next steps so that we can advise the Secretary General of the United Nations, who will then speak to the Presidents and craft a way forward,” said the chief, Americas Division in the Department of Political Affairs, Martha Doggett.

The UN is hoping to broker a meeting with President Granger and his Venezuelan counterpart Nicolas Maduro on the margins of the UN General Assembly to be held in September.
Venezuela has renewed its claim to the mineral and forest-rich Essequibo region and all of the Atlantic Sea off the Essequibo Region.

Maduro issued a Decree on May 26 that includes all the Atlantic waters off the Essequibo Coast.

The purported annexation of the waters off Essequibo now takes in the oil-rich Stabroek Block, where American oil giant Exxon Mobil in May found a “significant” reserve of high quality crude oil.

ExxonMobil said the discovery was made in one of the two wells it dug, in the Liza-1 drill site, which realised more than 295 feet of high-quality oil-bearing sandstone.

But Jagdeo said that his party, which lost power in the general election earlier this year after more than two decades in power, would most likely not participate in a Social Cohesion roundtable scheduled for September 3 because of the alleged mass dismissal of several people by the new coalition government.

Jagdeo said when he was informed by Social Cohesion Minister that parliamentarians have been invited to the roundtable, he told her that the PPP would before weekend decide whether it would attend.

“The concern is that we can’t talk about social cohesion without social inclusion and what we have now is the wanton firing of people with very little credible reason and therefore it runs against the core of what we are trying to achieve at the conference so given that I am doubtful that we could participate at this time,”

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the British High Commission here have together offered to fully finance the Ministry of Social Cohesion’s National Roundtable to be held at the Arthur Chung Convention Centre.
Asked by reporters whether he thought Monday’s talks with President Granger were genuine or was merely politically grandstanding, Jagdeo replied “ I don’t want to be premature on anything but I have to, until proven otherwise, take the President seriously when he says that he wants to have discussions on these issues”.

But President Granger said he was pleased that the meeting had taken place given the challenges facing the country.

“Once Mr. Jagdeo was elected Leader of the Opposition, I wrote him inviting him [inviting him] to talks, because as Leader of Opposition he has certain Constitutional obligations,” Granger said.