The People's Constitutional Committee is set to get working this month, but alarms were raised yet again this week when it was discovered that the Kriol Council, which was either overlooked or deliberately excluded in July, remains excluded.
This, after the council, petitioned for the inclusion of council members Anthony Sylvestre and Adelia Young who they had named as their picks for roles on the council.
But despite that informal acknowledgement, the only thing that has been said on the record by Good Governance Director Cesar Ross. While he didn't rule out the Kriol Council's participation - he sought to lump them in with other Black and African groups who also want in on the deliberations. Back in July he said, quote: "We are looking at how to get one representative to speak for all of them, in an umbrella-type way." End quote.
But while they've received no formal acknowledgement, Interim President Marilyn Garvin says she believes that their participation is a go and cites the Prime Minister's affirmative words on the matter when he appeared on a radio show over the summer. We caught up with her this evening to ask her where the process is, and here's what she had to say about that.
Marilyn Garvin, Interim President National Creole Council
"As far as I am aware, up to the last I think two or three weeks. Ago from my understanding, we were on the commission. In speaking with the head of the governance unit we had a discussion as to. The criteria. How we could select who is best to sit on the commission, noh, And he gave us some guidelines. In speaking to him after that we wanted to find out when is the deadline that we should submit our representative and he said well you need to do it like ASAP so we worked on it and we submitted our two representatives and sent an official e-mail to him indicating these are our representatives and things like that and IO think it's on, my part is that he didn't respond so I didn't call back but I was of the impression because he said send it to himself along with his secretary and I did that. So, I did my part and we submitted that information. I mean aside from that we are actually, we went a step further and started the process of training and educating our members as to the structure of the constitution so that we could start, um, to look at it and to give feedback as to the way forward. As to how we want our areas we want to get dressed within the Constitution, noh."
"As far as I know it is still a go. I just tried to call the heads of. The government/governance unit and surprisingly no response so far but I tried, I texted, I called, so I don't know what's happening."
We'll keep following the story.
