It is now almost two months since the people of Guyana exercised their inalienable sovereign right to choose their representatives in Government, but they are still in the dark as to when their will, expressed via their votes, would be declared.
The country has, not surprisingly, been placed under a great deal of stress because of the outbreaks of violence precipitated by the PNC and its surrogates, which have marred the outcome of previous elections. Adding to that stress has been the COVID-19 pandemic that has placed the world, and our country, into a lockdown mode to slow its deadly spread.
Under such conditions, it is important to examine the roles played by the institutions that have a major stake in the election crisis, not only to delineate their responsibilities to work towards defusing the crisis, but also to possibly identify changes that might have to be engendered in these institutions so that our country is not subjected to these stresses in the future.
The crisis was actually more than a year in the making – from the day the NCM was passed – but the PNC-led coalition refused to obey the clear instructions of the Constitution, and elections were delayed for a year.
The institutions that contributed to that charade, which had to be settled in disparaging terms by the CCJ, were the PNC-led coalition and GECOM. These two institutions played a tag-team game in dragging out the elections date via a variety of stratagems executed by PNC leader David Granger’s unilaterally appointed GECOM Chairman, James Patterson.
Finally, a new Chair – Justice Claudette Singh – was agreed to by Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, and it was hoped that at least this institution would act in the national interest. Very early on, however, the Chair signalled she would make decisions in accordance with the law, but would also, in the law’s performative aspect, attempt to strike a balance between the Government and the Opposition’s positions when they conflicted.
After a while, however, it became clear that the Chair was going out of her way to mollify the PNC-led government, even when it was neither legally demanded nor in the country’s interest to do so. This was illustrated graphically in her handling of the H2H registration, which was authorised by her illegally-appointed predecessor upon the demand of the PNC/APNU/AFC combine.
While cancelling the H2H exercise after it was almost complete, rather than discarding the unverified data and completing the Official List of Electors (OLE) from the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) that was subjected to a Claims and Objections (C&O) process in accordance with the law, she inexplicably ordered that the data be merged into the OLE. This was accomplished at great expense, while dragging the elections date out but doing nothing to reduce the “bloating” that Granger had originally complained about.
In the present iteration of the PNC/APNU/AFC’s stretching out of the recount, the PPP made ten motions in relation to forming a work plan for the recount, of which only two were accepted. Glaringly, it could not have escaped the Chair’s attention that the fatal flaw in the count was the manner in which the Reg 4 SoPs were tabulated. Yet, while accepting that there should be a recount, she steadfastly refused to instruct that the recount begin with the SoPs from that region, or even in conjunction with Reg 1, as the PPP requested in a spirit of compromise. The PNC/APNU/AFC coalition had requested that the recount be done in numerical order of the regions, and this is what the Chair has ruled.
Just as significant was her refusal to have the SoPs for Reg 4, in the possession of the CEO, be made available to the Commission.
After her string of one-sided decisions over the last year, the PPP has ruefully been forced to conclude that she has shown clear bias for the caretaker administration.
There must be root-and-branch reform of GECOM.
