Well, how about that?!! Pressie had to’ve shocked the dickens – meaning “shocked the Devil! – out of the Opposition when he made his midnight announcement on Independence Day that General Elections 2025 are gonna be held on Sept 1st!! They were all prepared to kvetch about not being invited to Anna Regina to witness the hoisting of the Golden Arrowhead when …BOOM!! Elections in three months!! This, of course, satisfies the 3-month requirement for announcing elections – so as to give the opposition parties “fair” warning. But from the sorry state the Opposition is in, you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll be concocting something or other to scream about!!
There will be the usual misdirection about “biometrics” – supposedly to prevent the dead from resurrecting and locals from impersonating furriners – to vote come Sept 1!! Never mind they’ve got the legal right to appoint election agents to scrutinize the bona fides of EVERY PERSON who shows up to vote!! Not only by scrutinizing their national IDs but also by retrieving their pics from the GECOM data base!! While in theory “biometrics” sounds foolproof, it creates a new set of contingencies – such as hacking etc- that can be used to challenge the elections – which is what the biometrics demands are really all about, innit??!!
Anyhow what’s really getting the Opposition’s bucktas and drawers in knots is their inability to cobble together a coalition to take on the PPP – which has been single mindedly courting votes from “non-traditional” areas. Like African and Indigenous Guyanese. Now parties hoping to contest the elections have 32 days before elections day – meaning latest by July 29. Now if they weren’t able to coalesce in two years, is it likely they’ll do it in two months??
Well, some will say the prospect of them going to the polls separately – and automatically splitting their votes like an atom fissioning – might focus their minds on the guaranteed proposition they’re gonna be out in the wilderness for the foreseeable future!! And then some!! With the energetic Irfaan Ali at the helm and VP Jagdeo in the engine room for the next five years, that PPP ship of state might just be sailing all the way into 2050 on just the momentum developed!!
Now as all of you know, dear readers, your Eyewitness not only accepts from a theoretical position that a strong opposition is salutary for a well-functioning democracy – but he also has a soft spot for Aubrey Norton. He never liked how his opponents derided him as not being “classy” – even when by asserting that they proved THEY lacked class!!
If they all now eat humble pie and “beg pardon” of Aubrey, maybe a coalition miracle might happen??
…lands in Suriname
While our elections are three months away, next door Suriname – with oil production in the offing from deep-sea fields similar to ours – held theirs on Sunday. And as has become the norm over there with their electorate split in general along ethnic lines – there Indians or “Hindustanis”; Mixed or Coloureds; Africans-Maroons; and Javanese – the results were similar to the previous one. The two major parties representing Indians and Mixed are practically neck and neck according to the early numbers – which are gonna hold.
So what we can expect is the bargaining by those two parties with the smaller ones where the latter will extract several pounds of flesh for their support. And this will generate the same dynamics that has kept Suriname mired in the politics of “clientelism”. The government’s treasury becomes a fund that must be shared with the parties’ supporters for the political support of the government in Parliament!!
“Jobs for the boys” rather than merit rule the day – and ruin the economy!!
