…by Granger
After playing ducks-and-drakes with his unencumbered constitutional responsibility to proclaim an election date and prorogue Parliament (Art 61), the Caretaker President Granger coyly teased that he would finally do so last night. He didn’t; which shouldn’t have surprised anybody, since it’s now clear that prevarication is second nature to him. Think of it: When has Granger ever kept his word? An officer and a gentleman he’s not. No wonder Hoyte bypassed him for Joe Singh!!
But this is when the faecal matter collides with the oscillatory rotating device, and it’s gonna hit everyone in this country in the face, including supporters of Granger and the PNC. In the blogsphere, the latter are chuckling that “Granger got Jagdeo”! It would appear they see this vitiation of the Constitution as a schoolyard prank played by Granger on Jagdeo. But it’s not!
Your Eyewitness will once again remind all and sundry that Granger’s continued constitutional transgressions are cutting the limb on the tree of democracy on which we’re very precariously perched. Granger’s mentor, Burnham, showed us that the edifice of a dictatorship isn’t built in the stealth of the night, but brick by brick in broad daylight. And he could do so because his supporters excused every transgressive brick, because “you can’t let THEM get into office!” Sounds familiar??
But the rigging – also seen as a joke by his supporters – started Guyana on the moral slippery slope that eventually consumed us all.
Elections are the lifeblood of democracy, and once a government knows it can get away with rigging, it doesn’t even need supporters; they’re all expendable. Let it not be forgotten that, by 1992, when democracy was finally restored, a Household Income and Expenditure Survey earlier in the year showed that Guyana had a poverty rate of 43%!! But, more pertinently, African Guyanese had a greater poverty rate than Indian Guyanese.
Granger and crew have “convinced” their supporters that the NCM was an “act of treachery”, and not a principled action inserted into parliamentary democratic constitutions to insist that governments retain the legitimacy of the peoples’ support via their representatives. So all is excused! Never mind that, in 2014, the AFC and APNU were moving an NCM when Ramotar prorogued Parliament to stymie them. Unless PNC supporters wake up, “too late shall be the cry” after elections, if the PNC is allowed to rig them. And this has to be the reason why they’re fighting a rearguard action to delay elections.
What Granger’s doing in not proclaiming an election date is trying to lure the PPP back into the National Assembly to clean up his faecal matter.
This not just eye-pass by Granger!!
…once again
Granger is fond of the word “vulgarian”. He first used it to describe the PPP’s interruption of his “throne speech” in the National Assembly some time ago. And he used it again when his speech at the Pegasus was interrupted by some PPP members. Now, a “vulgarian” is “an unrefined person, especially one with newly acquired power or wealth.” So who’s the vulgarian in Guyana today?
After 23 years in the wilderness, Granger, at the head of the PNC, acceded to “newly acquired power and wealth” through the support of the AFC. What was Granger doing? Burnishing his journalistic credentials with his “Guyana Review”, wherein he moulded the ideology imparted by Burnham into a neo-liberal milieu.
Becoming President with all the “pelf and power” has clearly gone to his head. Who but a vulgarian would stiff the fella who pushed him over the line and who was promised to be a PM with clout?? And then tell the man the promise wasn’t “constitutionally fit and proper”!!
But going on to violate every constitutional stipulation in the book that had to do with holding free and fair elections!!
…stopped in its tracks!!
The English Supreme Court overturned Boris Johnson’s prorogation because his rationale conflicted with the raison d’etre of Parliament – to scrutinise the actions of the Executive.
And our CCJ didn’t want to instruct OUR politicians explicitly!! Connivance!!A
