“Alexander wants to run GECOM” – Commissioner Rohee

– says Opposition Commissioner failed to distinguish between policy decisions and internal administrative matters

Government-nominated Commissioner at the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Clement Rohee has stated that his Opposition counterpart, Vincent Alexander, seems to want to dictate how the election body conducts its internal staffing arrangements.

Following reports of GECOM Chair, Retired Justice Claudette Singh, creating a temporary position to execute functions of the Deputy Chief Elections Officer, the Elections Commission on Friday clarified that this is untrue and that it was only a secondment that will be reverted once the substantive DCEO post is filled.
Based on a request from Chief Elections Officer (CEO) Vishnu Persaud, last November, Justice Singh approved the secondment of GECOM’s IT Manager Aneal Giddings to the Operations Department of the Commission’s Secretariat to assist with the day-to-day implementation and evaluation of the statutory and administrative tasks delineated in the work plan for the conduct of Local Government Elections (LGEs), which is slated for this year. Giddings is being referred to as ‘Operations Coordinator’ within the Secretariat’s Operations Department.
But Alexander, a PNC-nominated Commissioner at GECOM, has since contended that the GECOM Chair has “…no authority to create any position and make appointments to any such position, be it temporary or otherwise.”
In response to this, Commissioner Rohee posited that Alexander wants to deny the Chair’s role in supporting a legitimate recommendation from CEO Persaud to assign acting responsibilities to senior staffers.
“In other words, …Alexander wants to run GECOM from whatever limb he may be perched on,” Rohee posted.

He stated that the Opposition Commissioner has consistently failed to make the distinction between policy decisions made at statutory meetings of GECOM and internal administrative matters in relation to staff at GECOM’s Secretariat consistent with the organisation’s constitutional responsibilities.
“In his latest criticism levelled against the Chairman of GECOM, Alexander failed to understand that the time is long gone when he and his party can dictate to GECOM what internal actions it may employ to enhance the organisation’s effectiveness and efficiency in order to fulfil its constitutional mandate,” Rohee noted.
According to him, GECOM has already made it clear that the Chair was in no way creating any new position nor was any substantive appointment being done to fill a vacant position.
In fact, Rohee pointed Alexander to the Commission’s statement which outlined that “…there is the precedence of staff having been seconded, and in one case even appointed, without the knowledge and approval of the Commission.”
Rohee contended that “Alexander must know about the ‘one case’ referred to in GECOM’s statement. The case in point is when a much-favoured Registration Officer was kept at GECOM’s Secretariat unknown to the Commission and was never sent back to the Registration Office. The said individual was appointed to act as GECOM’s Voter Registration Manager (VRM) without the approval of the Commission and was provided with entitlements in which the substantive office holder must be the sole beneficiary. Talk about disingenuousness!”
Further, Commissioner Rohee thought it apposite to recall the unproven allegations Alexander had expressed publicly about Vishnu Persaud, who had applied for the job as CEO at GECOM and which Alexander and his ilk had blocked, resulting in a court judgement against him.
Alexander, who was the first named defendant in that case, was ordered by the court to pay damages in the sum of $2,500,000 to Persaud and the sum of $150,000 as costs.
Moreover, Rohee noted that mention must be made of Alexander and his comrades’ questionable role in the appointment of Roxanne Myers over Persaud referencing her “superior qualifications and potential to perform” as well their reference to the undisclosed ‘Sandra Jones Report’ and GECOM’s Policy on Employment Practices. Those inaccuracies were brought to light during an investigation by an Ethnic Relations Commission (ERC) sub-committee headed by Stanley Moore, Retired Justice of Appeal.
That body had considered it an act of discrimination to appoint Myers over Persaud, saying “There are no institutional rules or practice in GECOM which allows for ethnic discrimination in hiring.”
To buttress this view, the investigation concluded that “Mr Persaud was the first candidate in the history of GECOM who had obtained the highest score and had not been appointed… Nothing has been presented to us which, at least on paper, reveals any attributes in Ms Myers that were capable of offsetting the clear paper advantage which Mr Persaud enjoyed over his rival.”
According to Rohee, the same trend continues nowadays at the GECOM statutory meetings where claims of ‘incompetence’, ‘untrustworthiness’ and ‘conspiracies’ are persistently levelled by the Opposition trio against the CEO as well as claims of ‘unfairness’ and ‘partiality’ in the decision-making process levelled against the Chairman.
“Alexander and his two political siblings operate as though nothing has changed since August 2020. They conveniently overlook the political handlers’ transgressions they had either stoutly defended or remained silent about during December 2019 to August 2020, constitutional and electoral travails the people of Guyana experienced as a result of the dirty tricks played by those ensconced at Congress Place,” Commissioner Rohee indicated.