Executive member of the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C), Dr Roger Luncheon has made several damning allegations against the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), particularly as it relates to the process of selecting staff for various positions within the Commission’s headquarters.
Dr Roger Luncheon
The former Cabinet Secretary said in a statement on Monday that it was brought to his attention from several sources that the People’s National Congress (PNC) Commissioners at GECOM are allegedly engaged in a process to eliminate candidates for advertised positions at the GECOM Secretariat.
He said it would seem that these Commissioners were aiming at such an objective by resorting to “giving low to zero scores to candidates of Indian origin who are shortlisted during the interview process while providing high to 100 per cent scores to their preferred candidates”.
In addition to that, the former Head of the Presidential Secretariat also alleged that the Commissioners were finding extraneous reasons for eliminating top candidates of Indian origin from appointment to positions at the GECOM Secretariat. He said if these disclosures are confirmed, it would reveal that the practice continued of excluding some ethnicities from GECOM’s Secretariat.
“Once confirmed the PPP condemns this practice in the strongest possible terms and will urge the aggrieved candidates to approach the Ethnic Relations Commission on the ground of ethnic discrimination,” the PPP stalwart added.
As part of preparations for the upcoming Local Government Elections (LGE), GECOM has started a new cycle of continuous registration. Several public advertisements were posted in the media for various openings, which Dr Luncheon has referred to in his statement to the media.
The new registration exercise, which began on May 21, will run until July 15, 2018. Persons needing to register are being advised to visit the office in their respective communities between 08:00h and 17:00h from Monday to Thursday, 08:00h to 16:00h on Friday and 10:00h to 14:00h on weekends and holidays.
Previously, the PPP has said that one of five GECOM-issued lists of persons who died between December 2015 and March 2016 included the names of persons whose names are not on the voters’ list – that is they were never registered. The Party had said when it checked that list, many of those names of presumably unregistered persons were, in fact, on the voters list.
The PPP has since urged GECOM to exercise greater care and due diligence in its attempts to sanitise the list. “We will continue to partner with GECOM and other stakeholders, in a concerted effort, to produce a List of Registered Electors that is accurate and whose integrity can withstand objective scrutiny,” the Party said.
