Dear Editor,
I am really concerned by this call from the General Secretary of the People’s National Congress (PNC), Amna Ally, on the need for new house-to-house voter registration. Many see this call as a ploy by President Granger to delay the general elections. Fact – any such process will cost over G$1.5 billion and will be prolonged. The outcome – a delayed 2020 elections by as much as two to three years.
This call for new house-to-house elections is the bird call to the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) Chairman to switch on his “follow the leader” hat and commence “project buy time” for the PNC.
So, I reject this call from Amna Ally since the GECOM list even with its challenges is credible irrespective of what the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and PNC say. The credibility of elections is characterised by the transparency in the process, the accountability by GECOM to the population, and inclusivity of the population in the process? I do not see any of this under threat right now even with a PNC biased GECOM Chairman.
No one will doubt that GECOM had many challenges between the 1992 and 2015 elections but even the worst of those elections passed the credibility test. Show me a country that has a 100 per cent perfect election – there is none. So why is the PPP demanding perfection?
Every election has anomalies and if it is less than two per cent of the voting roll, then it falls outside of the normal distribution of the process and can be deemed as credible. In all of our elections, including the one where David Granger won by 4000 votes, the PPP could not have overturned that score even if all the votes were recounted. Actually, I think if the votes were recounted, Granger might have gotten more votes and the PNC one more in 2015 because he was more popular than Donald Ramotar by a mile. But those days are gone forever and Bharrat Jagdeo is at his peak of popularity today.
What the PPP should be really focusing on is the process from now until 2020. Are fair-minded Guyanese being hired into GECOM or PNC political hacks? Is GECOM getting the resources it needs to conduct the elections efficiently? Is the database well protected and what can be done to beef up the security of the database? How is GECOM coming along with its preparation for the December 2018 Local Government Elections which will be a dry run for the 2020 elections? These are the issues, not the quality of the list.
The PPP has to stop this obsession with the purity of the list and focus on the operations in GECOM because the PNC will milk their insecurities to fulfil their Congress Place agenda of delaying the elections.
It is the duty of the PPP to take this fight to the PNC and stop all this nonsense of issue infantile statements and take some people on the street on the more important issues, like the sugar workers severance pay.
Sincerely,
Jai (Harry) Lall
