Geisha Kow­lessar

At her first chair­ing of the na­tion­al coun­cil meet­ing of the Con­gress of the Peo­ple (COP), Car­olyn Seep­er­sad-Bachan vowed to deal with dis­en­chant­ment with­in the par­ty and to strength­en ties with the com­mu­ni­ties. She said she would al­so be im­ple­ment­ing a "po­si­tion pa­per" to guide mem­bers on how to "agree to dis­agree."

The COP's new na­tion­al ex­ec­u­tive was for­mer­ly in­stalled yes­ter­day with Seep­er­sad-Bachan as the chair­man. In a press con­fer­ence held at the COP's op­er­a­tions cen­tre in Char­lieville, Ch­agua­nas, yes­ter­day, Seep­er­sad-Bachan said: "I re­port­ed to the na­tion­al coun­cil that we would be prepar­ing a po­si­tion pa­per on the rules of en­gage­ment as to how we move for­ward with the prin­ci­ple of agree­ing to dis­agree.

"That po­si­tion pa­per would be go­ing to the next chair­man's meet­ing which is sched­ule to take place in ear­ly De­cem­ber," Seep­er­sad-Bachan added. Say­ing a num­ber of is­sues were al­so ad­dressed, Seep­er­sad-Bachan added these in­clud­ed 90-day plans which were put for­ward from each of the new­ly-elect­ed sec­re­taries.

"The fo­cus of those plans are the is­sues raised dur­ing our cam­paign. One was that we need to re­con­nect with the mem­ber­ship of our par­ty," she said. She said a plan was al­so ex­pect­ed to be put in place to boost the spir­its of dis­cour­aged par­ty mem­bers.

"We need to ad­dress the is­sues raised by the many who are dis­il­lu­sioned and dis­en­chant­ed," Seep­er­sad-Bachan said. "We are set­ting up a plan and as a re­sult of that on it would tell us how we need to go back to the ground and how we re-es­tab­lish all our com­mu­ni­ty cir­cles, re­ac­ti­vate it and where there are non-ex­is­tant cir­cles how we es­tab­lish those."

She said the COP al­so want­ed to en­sure all "pol­i­cy po­si­tions" were not on­ly heard but un­der­stood. "We will be es­tab­lish­ing a lead­er­ship and de­vel­op­ment school to al­low our mem­bers to be­come the com­mu­ni­ca­tion of­fi­cers of the COP," Seep­er­sad-Bachan said.

Lo­cal gov­ern­ment elec­tions were al­so high on the agen­da and the par­ty was al­so prepar­ing to cam­paign. Say­ing dis­cus­sions were al­so held re­gard­ing how the COP im­proved its par­tic­i­pa­to­ry ap­proach to gov­er­nance of the coun­try, Seep­er­sad-Bachan said sev­er­al rec­om­men­da­tions were made and the par­ty would be tak­ing those po­si­tions for­ward.