A final appeal to David Granger: bow out in dignity now

Dear Editor,
This is my final appeal to caretaker President David Granger: bow out gracefully with dignity, before the door closes on him. You have but a short time to do this; time is not on your side anymore.
You played a long game of tactical obfuscation and blatant obstruction, trusting in the thin crust of your strategic calculus to ensconce you and your very able and vociferous enablers for another five years in office. However, you failed to make the distinction between strategy and tactic, and therein lies your demise.
As a former military officer, you are very familiar with the difference between battlefield tactics and political strategy; yet, you made some serious blunders along the way. Your goal or objective as a politician was to secure another term in office through the ballot box, but the tactics you deployed were clumsy and incongruous. You believed that your tactics chimed with the masterful machinations of Forbes Burnham, your ideology guru and political role model.
To begin, what your guru got away with in the period 1968 thru 1985 can no longer be duplicated. The 1960s and 1970s were a vastly different time and place from what the world is in 2020. Trying to cheat your way into office through clumsy manipulation of the electoral machinery set in motion a train of compelling events that backfired on you. Your tactical measures began with a devastating error, which an astute general would quickly recognise and take corrective action for. Instead, you piled on blunder after blunder; and as you sank deeper into the noxious artisan well of tactical blunders, your inflated and narcissistic ego would not allow you to cogitate course correction.
The first blunder was to have someone in your spirit shop dangle a monetary incentive to a returning officer to jettison the authentic statements of poll and concoct a spurious one. You set this circus in motion fully knowing that you lost the Election, as you were a recipient of all the Statements of Poll, which clearly and unambiguously showed that the PPP/C won. Yet, you marched on, blinded by your ambition to become like your guru and stay in power.
To this day, you have not admitted, and have no intention of admitting, that first blunder. What you did would drag an entire country through dirt and shame, but that did not matter to you. So, you dug your heels in and continued to fire off volleys of tactical shots at the court system, in spite of the fact that your ammunition was not live bullets, but blanks.
The tactic was aimed at delaying the inevitable for as long as possible, and you hoped that, with the passage of time, the international community, particularly the United States, would forget about your shenanigans and embrace you as before. But this miscalculation sealed your fate.
The United States, wary and disgusted at your continued gamesmanship to openly defraud an election and subvert the will of the people, fired a warning shot aimed at you and your enablers. It was a real bullet, not a blank one, and it hit its target with devastating effect.
Now that you are in their crosshairs, there is only one course of action open to you while you still have a little time left. The clock is ticking, it is 2 minutes to midnight. What say you, David? This is your Goliath moment. Will you this time go into your little bag and pull out a smooth pebble and slay Goliath? Goliath is your ego, and only you can slay that Id and regain your dignity.
You have to concede defeat before the Chairperson of GECOM makes the Declaration. If you are to do that, the international community and the people of Guyana would hail you as a champion. With that one stroke, you can then begin a new journey to a dignified life.
If you do not concede before the Declaration, you would be heading down the wrong path. You would be banned from entering the United States and other countries. You would be forced to leave office a disgraced and broken man. The choice is yours, and the clock is ticking.
Finally, do not take any comfort in the thought that when Joe Biden is sworn in as President of the USA on 20th January 2021, he would magically lift sanctions on you and your cohorts. If you refused to leave office, the screws will be tightened to the point that you cannot breathe. Biden, as Vice President, was closest to President Obama, the drone president. You should have some idea about the lethality and surgical precision of drones.
And then there is the unchallenged issue that continues to be adumbrated by your supporters: that “Guyana is a Black nation.” And by Black they mean Afro-Guyanese. You need to set the record straight: 30 percent of the population in Guyana does not make for a Black nation, and that 30 percent does not account for the major contribution of taxes into Government coffers.
Black governance in Guyana was always minority rule. And it happened thru deliberate rigging of elections, to the extent that election rigging is in the DNA of the PNC. Save yourself and save the country by doing the honourable, dignified and gracious thing: concede defeat before the Declaration.

Sincerely,
Prof Daniel K Gibran
GDF veteran