Ramjattan ‘strongly’ believes he will be Coalition’s PM Candidate

Leader of the Alliance for Chance (AFC) Khemraj Ramjattan Monday said the chances are “very good” of him being selected as the Coalition’s Prime Ministerial Candidate for the upcoming general elections.

Asked about his chances, Ramjattan told reporters: “You don’t think that Ramjattan is good enough to be a Prime Minister of your country or you think that he is such a rotten character that he ought not to be?”

The AFC, the second largest party in the Coalition that contested and won the May 2015 elections, on June 15 last voted to replace current Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo on the slate for the upcoming elections.

The AFC and the five-party bloc APNU are currently in negotiations to revise the Cummingsburg Accord which brought them together in 2015 and Ramjattan suggested the decision has not been finalized.

But he hardly had any doubts that his candidacy will be accepted.

“It is for the people who are negotiating as to what we’re going to do,” Ramjattan said.

“I strongly believe that, yes, it will happen,” he stated.

President David Granger has announced that general and regional elections will be held on March 2, more than 14 months after the Coalition government was toppled in a No Confidence motion.

It was Charrandass Persaud, a Parliamentarian from the AFC, who defected and voted against his own government, giving the opposition the 33 votes needed in the 65-seat House to cause a collapse of the government.

The country’s last court of resort, the Caribbean Court of Justice, recently ruled that the government is in caretaker mode.

Key international partners, including the Commonwealth, the United Kingdom, the EU, and the United States, have deemed the government unconstitutional.