The Oxford English Dictionary tells us that “reconciliation” means “the restoration of friendly relations”. It is our premise that every Guyanese agrees that, after the very contentious March elections, there is need for reconciliation among the supporters of the various “sides” that contested those elections.
The fly in the ointment, however, is that the dictionary also gives us a second meaning to the word reconciliation: “the action of making one view or belief compatible with another”.
In Guyana today, there are two starkly disparate views on the March 2 elections, and these must be made “compatible” with each other. This will not be easy, but we can do worse than delineate the factual basis of the disagreement.
The breakdown in the “friendly relations” – usually quite evident in the quotidian activities of ordinary citizens – occurred after the elections. Fortunately, we can pinpoint the exact circumstance under which the breakdown occurred, and the identification of this might assist in the reconciliation process.
Election Day was relatively incident-free, and all and sundry complimented GECOM on this accomplishment. The next step, “counting the ballots at the place of poll”, also occurred hitch-free. Statements of Poll (SOPs) were distributed to all the political parties’ representatives at the Polling Stations, and one copy thereof was displayed outside the polling place. At this point, any citizen could now check on the voting pattern of the residents of the community, and even take pictures of the SOP for their records.
The third step was to have the SOPs from each region transported to the office of the Regional Officers (ROs), where they would be tabulated in a statutorily transparent manner by the RO in front of the (named) stakeholders. All went well with nine of the Regional tabulations, but at the 10th, Region 4, the breakdown occurred. The facts of the matter that had RO Clairmont Mingo at its centre are so well ventilated that they do not need to be reprised, but yet form the basis of the “incompatible beliefs” that need to be reconciled.
The most objective, indisputable fact is that Mingo, at this first tabulation at Ashmins, caused the Opposition parties and Observers to object to the methodology of the process. As such, the aggrieved parties resorted to the Courts, which instructed that the statutory procedure must be followed. The tabulation resumed at the GECOM Compound, and even though the Opposition again complained about the process, a tabulation was delivered which showed a particular distribution of votes for the various parties. Most pertinently, it showed the APNU/AFC with 136,057 votes as opposed to the PPPC with 77,231 votes. The APNU/AFC and their supporters are insisting that these are the numbers that must be used to determine the winner of the elections, which would be APNU/AFC.
Following an excruciating 35-day recount of the ballots represented by the SOPs that Mingo had tabulated, the Reg 4 votes showed the APNU/AFC garnering 116,941 votes versus the PPPC’s 80,920. By this count, the PPPC was eventually declared the winner of the elections, which APNU/AFC and their supporters are disputing. The numbers, however, were substantially identical to the numbers that the PPPC had produced from their copies of the SOPs the day after the elections. Neither APNU/AFC nor GECOM have produced their copies of the SOPs to this day.
While APNU/AFC, subsequent to Mingo’s original count, claimed (and still do) that there were “anomalies”, these did not affect the actual ballots summarised by the SOPs. If, for instance, there were instances of persons impersonating dead persons on the voters list, or impersonating persons who had migrated, that is a horse of a different colour, which would be addressed by the Courts in determining APNU/AFC’s elections petition.
Those claimed anomalies do not explain the inflation of the APNU/AFC’s votes and reduction of the PPPC’s, which had to have been the result of a deliberate manipulation by Mingo.
For there to be a reconciliation between the two factions in our country, there has to be an agreement on this by one and all.
