The People’s National Party (PNP) presidential race grew more contentious yesterday with an accusation that challenger Peter Bunting’s Rise United team is trying to use money to influence delegates before they vote this weekend.
KD Knight, chairman of PNP President Dr Peter Phillips’s OnePNP campaign, called on the party’s Election Monitoring Committee to immediately investigate an announcement by Rise United Chairman Mark Golding that he has raised over $10 million to create an endowment fund to help struggling party workers.
OnePNP Chairman KD Knight wants the committee to investigate in whose name was funds raised, in which account was the money deposited, and what PNP office was used to approach potential donors.
“This suspicious fund-raising scheme is not a PNP initiative, as it has not been sanctioned by the party’s annual conference, NEC (National Executive Council), nor the Executive Committee,” Knight said in a statement.
On Sunday, Golding told a throng of PNP supporters at a Rise United mass rally in the St Andrew South Western constituency that Bunting had given the go-ahead to enact a fund which would assist party workers in need.
“You know, Comrades, when we were talking about this mission and this Rise United [campaign] we thought about it and we said, ‘You know, in many, many parts of Jamaica, when we go on political work we see Comrades, some of them have served many, many years, warriors fi di People’s National Party living in destitution — roof leaking, house pop down, and we said that can’t be right for our noble movement. [We said] we must put something in place to ensure that those people can live in dignity, having served our movement,” Golding told the crowd.
He said that Bunting told him to ‘Go ahead, design an endowment fund for the party workers who need that help’.
“Comrades, I am pleased to be able to announce to you tonight that I have been able to successfully raise over $10 million for that endowment fund. Those contributors and those donors have said to me ‘give us Peter Bunting. Give us a PNP that can take on the Labourites and win, and we will fund that endowment fund for your party workers and Comrades’.
“I am confident that the delegates will do the right thing and make that happen because we have the plan and we have the mission to uplift our movement,” Golding said to jubilant supporters ahead of Saturday’s polls scheduled for the National Arena in Kingston.
But Knight and the OnePNP team have described the move as a “brazen attempt to use cash inducements to influence delegates in the presidential election”.
Knight said Rise United is trading on the economic needs of Comrades, “and it is a despicable attempt to use money to grab power, which has never been a part of the internal PNP democracy”.
He called on the Rise United campaign to “cease and desist” from importing alien behaviour into the PNP, adding that Golding gave up the treasury of the party on the grounds that he was not good at fund-raising, “yet he is spearheading an unauthorised fund-raising scheme with the sole purpose of influencing votes”.
