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Dear Editor,
I am aware that Mrs. Sheila Holder, GAP-WPA MP and the WPA whose women leaders identified her as a likely MP, are now at variance.
This letter will steer clear of that issue and of reports of what her new platform thinks of the WPA. I simply wish to make sure that the contribution of persons who do good work in any area be not clouded by issues that arise later. Her breach with the WPA does not erase the work that she did.
I did not know Mrs. Holder well before she became politically active. I wish to say some things about her, as a newcomer to national politics.
As an MP Sheila Holder has been zealous, hardworking, alert and competent. She reads every official document and always has a living grasp of the issues. She reads the Auditor General's Reports and seeks out and obtains information relating to the work of the National Assembly, and the welfare of the country. She is not shy of economic, financial or budgetary issues, memoranda of understanding, documents from the multilateral or international financial agencies, and of procedure; she has harried the Ministers with questions and has been always articulate in communicating. I know of her efforts along with a few other MPs to implement the changes to the constitution made by the CRC.
When I was in the Rodney House as general political handyman and co-opted member of the Executive, we visited several villages, often with Desmond Trotman, the Centre Manager and my fellow office jumbie. We even began trying to make young people in three West Coast Berbice villages aware of the threat of HIV and AIDS. She drove us there, as we had no other transport.
With a public-spirited supporter of the GAP-WPA, Richard Finemesser, a non-member, she followed the WPA tradition of ongoing service to the remote Pakaraimas, Region Eight, and assisted in the formation of an empowering local organisation among the residents. She frequently lamented the failure of the Parliament Office to serve her fellow MP from the Rupununi.
Her request for office space at parliament building, refused by the Speaker on suspicion, showed the narrow concept of the rights of MPs and thus of the people they are seen as representing.
I know nothing of her early, formal preparation. From the news she has been known as a consumer activist, an area also occupying the talents and competence of an exceptional Guyanese resource, Ms Eileen Cox, Mr. Pat Dyal and others. This pursuit seemed to penetrate every aspect of public life often involving the thorny and complicated issues of utility regulation.
It will be no exaggeration to say that, because of the decision of the main opposition to boycott most sittings of the Assembly in line with their view of things, for much of the time a handful of MPs often one, carried much of the weight and brunt of the attempts in the National Assembly to make the government accountable.
Since no one else may be willing in these circumstances to speak of Mrs Holder's service to the country I do it, aware that the politics of the letter may be misunderstood.
Elsewhere I have regretted that MP Mrs Backer's most ingenious motion on the conduct of the Guyana Police Force has never been debated, first because of the government's stubborn refusal for about a year to bring it forward and next because of her own party's boycott of the Assembly. A timely debate on that issue would certainly have made a difference. Two years of negative developments might have been avoided or might have taken place in quite another context.
I suspect that some of the personalities named in this letter might not have chosen to be read on the same page as others. I have not spoken of similar persons, but of persons whose service may have gone unnoticed. I hope that this qualifies it as a non-partisan or politically neutral letter.
The PPP also has resourceful women, but they have been too cramped until recently with democratic centralism, as we were reminded by Dr. Luncheon.
Yours faithfully,
Eusi Kwayana
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