The People’s National Congress announced that its long-overdue congress will be held on December 11, 2021. The election for the party’s leadership is up for grabs. The present leader is still missing in action (MIA). He has not said if he is still interested in the leadership of the party, or if he will throw his support to the man who has stood by his side through thick and thin – Joe Harmon. David Granger took a leave of absence, and therefore he is the MIA leader at this time. Volda Lawrence, the acting leader of the PNC, has so far not indicated if she is running for the leader’s position or for anything else, including as the Chairperson of the party, a position she presently holds. Aubrey Norton, who has been fired more than once by the PNC, wants to be the leader now. Back in the early 1990s, he was famously fired by Desmond Hoyte, who asserted that Norton was his “creature,” and therefore he, Hoyte, had the absolute freedom to fire him. “Baby Doc” Van West-Charles is also running for the party’s leadership.
Granger barely lifted his head above the surface this week to do two things. First, he tried to have the PNC Congress postponed again, so he could hold on a little longer as the leader. Most persons want to know why would David Granger want a job that he has not been performing for a very long time now. He was an MIA Leader of the Opposition before 2015, an MIA President between 2015 and 2020, and now an MIA Leader of the PNC. Now he wants the party to defer their congress and the election for leadership for another few months. He knows well about deferring and postponing things.
We cannot forget he postponed the constitutionally-mandated elections after the No-Confidence Motion on December 21st 2018. That election was illegally postponed for more than a year, with the help of the courts in Guyana. Is Granger scared of losing his job, or is it that he wants to defer the elections so that he could scheme for a rigged electoral process? After all, we all now know that one of the reasons for the reluctance to hold the elections by March 2020, after the December 21st 2018 No-Confidence Motion, was that his party needed time to consolidate the rigging machinery in GECOM. Many Guyanese suspect there are people in the PNC who want more time so they can mess with the party elections.
During this latest foray above the surface, the second thing Granger did was to demand a number of people be excluded from any role in putting together the party’s congress, but especially in coordinating the party’s election for leadership. He does not trust his own party people. Specifically, he does not want Aubrey Norton, Van West-Charles, Winston Felix, Mortimer Mingo and others to be anywhere near the electoral process for party leadership. Why does Granger, the leader of the PNC for the time being, want to keep these fellas far from the electoral process? Does he think they will rig the elections against him or his handpicked replacement? It is a sad day when we all in Guyana, including the PNC leader, are on the same wavelength in the belief that the party’s senior leaders and members are not to be trusted around an electoral process.
Karma is a terrible thing. Granger tried rigging the elections in Guyana when, in June 2018, he arbitrarily rejected eighteen outstanding citizens for the position of Chair of GECOM, and illegally and unconstitutionally appointed James Patterson as the Chair. Patterson’s mandate then was clear; he was supposed to set up the rigging machinery, but Granger’s calculation that Patterson would have been able to completely set up GECOM’s rigging machinery backfired. The Caribbean Court of Justice intervened and called out the fraud. When his colleagues tried to rig the results between March 2 and August 2, 2020, Granger stood by silent, MIA. Today, Granger is afraid that the “creatures” who were supposed to rig the 2020 elections might now want to rig the party’s internal elections.
While hilarious, it is at the same time tragic. But the tragic story here is that this is the PNC in its finest colours – it is a party steeped in rigging elections. Even more tragic is that the thing they have been known for throughout their 64 years’ history – rigged elections – they still cannot do it well. Between 1968 and 1992, they had rigged five elections, including a referendum. None of this rigging was done in any smart way. They were blatant and clumsy. In 2020, they tried the same clumsy way of cheating. The whole world saw them doing the rigging in plain sight. It was so clumsy that their own people were too ashamed to defend them. Now even Granger is afraid that the PNC is incapable of conducting a free and fair elections, even if it is their own internal party elections.
