Indigenous communities support LCDS, Carbon Credit Payment

Dear Editor,

Recently our Vice President announced that all Amerindian villages and communities will start receiving funds earned from the sale of Guyana’s carbon credit. Villages were set to get amounts ranging from $ 10 million to $35 million through a dedicated bank account setup by the village.

I have not seen one dissenting voice to the contrary other than the APA. The APA and a few voices purporting to speak on behalf of Amerindian people leaders are trying to discredit the LCDS and carbon credit scheme and hence trying to mislead the public and the ART Secretariat.

If the APA and the few voices are contending that the villages don’t support the LCDS and the carbon credit scheme nor were they consulted, let the villages speak for themselves. Let the village council come out and make that declaration, lets don’t have any peeping Thom.

It begs the question of who really is the APA and the few voices speaking on behalf of, don’t try to muzzle the village council. Let the village council of the dissenting communities come out and speak for themselves.

I rather suspect that the APA is trying to get villages to use their LCDS funds to finance some of its PR campaigns, under the purported notion of speaking on behalf of communities.

Villages were allegedly approached to earmark a portion of the funds for communication activities to be executed by the APA.

I am thus calling on all villages to be vigilant.

Dear Editor,

Iread a Demerara Waves report on the APNU+AFC’s call for Amerindians to receive a payout of between 25 per cent and 85 per cent from the sale of carbon credit and concluded it was sarcasm. Why so?

Readers would recall that it was the APNU+AFC government which fired just under 2000 Amerindian CSOs and stopped the Amerindian land titling project as soon as it entered office.

It was a minister of this very government who said Amerindians were being greedy with their demands for the resumption of the land titling project, during a debate in Parliament on a motion brought by the then PPP/C opposition to withdraw President Granger land rights COI, which many, including the National Toshao’s Council, felt would’ve dispossessed Amerindians of lands they were entitled to.

This very minister during his presentation said that if the APNU+AFC governed acceded to calls for Amerindian communities to enjoy subsurface rights for titled lands it would mean that only coastlanders should benefit from the oil and gas sector.

The actions of the APNU+AFC while in government as outlined above, and others which I did not mention, show a pattern of disdain towards Amerindians and actions that are inimical to their interests. Therefore, this feigned show of concern by way of their unrealistic calls for between 25 per cent and 85 per cent from the sale of carbon credits is purely sarcastic in nature.

The APNU+AFC did the exact thing in relation to the decriminalisation of possession of small amounts of marijuana. For five years while in government they refused to pass legislation towards this end then they sought to score political points with unrealistic demands of the new PPP/C government.

Yours truly, Annalise Humphrey Kwakwani, Region 10

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APNU/AFC). So, as clearly iterated by the President, “We must never forget the struggles we went through to preserve our democracy.”

Let me close by invoking what Attorney General and Legal Affairs Minister Anil Nandlall, SC, intoned, which lends support to President Ali’s statement. According to the Legal Head, “…the people of Guyana must pledge to do everything in their power to ensure that those events never happen again here -something which he assured the current People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) Government was committed to.”

He detailed the determination to preserve democracy by assuring all that “…your gov-

Yours Sincerely, Peter

Persaud, TAAMOG

ernment is very much alive to those realities that we experienced, and we will work to ensure that the democratic credentials of this country are maintained and that we continue to work to deliver a better tomorrow for every single Guyanese”.

So far so good. We have Regional and General Elections in another two years, and very soon there will be Local Government Elections. I doubt APNU/AFC will try anything like what they attempted between March and August 2020.

Yours truly, H Singh