GPA’s diminished council decisions not legitimately made under its constitution

Dear Editor,
On July 1, 2020 – in the midst of what Bruce Golding referred to as the most transparent attempt to alter the results of an election he had ever seen – an article appeared in the Guyana Chronicle titled ‘Six lawyers in agreement – that CCJ has no jurisdiction to hear PPP’s claim’. I will spare the convoluted nonsense that was proposed by these six wise men (all conveniently aligned with the pseudo-legal arguments of APNU/AFC campaign’s efforts to rig the elections) who pronounced so profoundly upon the elephantine issue facing the country at the time, suffice to say that the CCJ quickly proved them to be utterly in the wrong.
The author of that enlightening piece of political pseudo-journalism, Svetlana Marshall, seems to have found herself once more on the easily rebuttable side of an electoral conflict, this time one in which she is a more active participant. Her letter, ‘Mr. [Neil] Marks clearly appears to be part of a wider campaign to discredit the GPA’, (May 17) defending the conduct of the recently concluded Guyana Press Association elections, has about as much substance as the legalistic contortions of those six gentlemen from 2020.
First of all, Ms. Marshall signs her letter as “Former Secretary” to the Association – she is more accurately the current Treasurer of the Association, meaning that as ‘Secretary’ (a position that does not exist within the GPA constitution) she presided over the conduct of an elections process in which she, as incumbent, intended to run for executive position.
In defence of her conduct and that of the wider council, Ms. Marshall makes the excuse that “With the Executive comprising only four persons in the lead up to the May 14, 2023 Elections, it was impractical for the small group of Executives to verify the status of the 223 members and process their dues on the same day of the Elections, while at the same time processing applications for new members.”
The GPA Constitution allows for nine council members, not four; this means that, at the time of the elections, the GPA was knowingly working with a vastly diminished council, making decisions in an election that was two cycles overdue, and without a quorum of five, as stipulated by 19.1. Article 18.2 allows the Council to fill a vacancy in its membership if the council is reduced to less than the prescribed quorum, and Article 15.4 confers powers on the council to co-opt [full] members or associates of the council in the furtherance of its duties – why was this not done to facilitate an election several years overdue?
Secondly, the issue raised by Neil Marks was about the departure from the previous practice of allowing registration and payment of dues up until the day of voting, not exclusively on that day, as Ms. Marshall disingenuously implies. That departure from previous practice constituted a de facto regulatory change that a council of four could not legitimately make under the constitution.
Even the account of her heroic efforts to register members raises more questions than provides answers. For example, I served as editor at Kaieteur News until October, 2021. I challenge any claim that says KN has “17 existing members of the Association, all of whom have been in the field of journalism for well over three years”.
Ms. Marshall claimed, “Based on legal advice sought, the membership list or the list of eligible persons could not have been provided beforehand to a third party.” There is, once again, a diminished council making a regulatory decision based on absurd and unpublished legal ‘advice’ from an unidentified lawyer (perhaps one of the six quoted in her 2020 elections article). As a member of the Press Association and a candidate in its elections, Mr. Marks could not logically be considered a third party to a list that incumbent executive candidate Marshall and at least two other (now reelected) executive incumbents were not only privy to, but involved in the construction and verification of. That the said list, which Mr. Marks has challenged, was only read out during the election smacks of Mingo’s Spreadsheet on a Bedsheet, no offence to my esteemed friend, Returning Officer Ronald Burch-Smith, who thankfully afforded Mr. Marks an opportunity to take pictures of the list of voters after the polls.
Notably, on Marks’s “claims that persons who were not qualified to vote – a taxi driver, a farmer and a handyman – voted”, Ms. Marshall does not directly answer the claim, but engages in the sophistry of “many media workers not only engage in their core responsibilities of gathering and dissemination of news, but also produce and host other programmes, even while serving as a full-time member of a media house.” It’s either at least three people – a taxi driver, a farmer, and a handyman – who were not eligible to vote, voted or not. I’ve attached a picture of Articles 3, and 4(i) of the GPA Constitution which speaks to eligibility.

Further, the admission that legal counsel was sought on the issue of the voters’ list but not on the issue of term limits, which faces the current council with Nazima Raghubir as President, shows a deliberate avoidance of that clear constitutional conflict. In my previous letter on this issue, I pointed out that there were two pathways for the GPA to still preserve the sanctity of term limits in the wake of Raghubir’s incumbent candidacy – have her not contend in the recently concluded election, or contend, and, on winning, hold an election in which she will not contend in January 2024, the sixth anniversary of her first being elected President of the GPA, the constitution of which clearly and explicitly provides a six-year consecutive term limit. I’ve discovered, on closer reading, another option existed – 13.4 provides for amendments to the Constitution at an AGM, with a requisite two-thirds majority. For some strange reason, even with the term limits issue raised in the public domain, this was not put on the agenda of the recently concluded meeting.
Of course, all questions about adherence to the Constitution of the GPA are moot within the larger scheme of things, considering that “the second oldest media membership and advocacy body in the English-speaking Caribbean” does not, in a functional legal sense, exist, having no legal registration of any kind, in keeping with its constitution.
One of the challenges I suspect facing Ms. Marshall in her new role as Treasurer is to reconcile the requirements of Articles 20.1-3 and 21.1 with the fact that while a registered private entity with presumably a bank account named the Guyana Press Association exists under the sole control of Raghubir (a GPA convention that preceded her), it has no legal fiscal connection to the GPA that held elections on Sunday.
I maintain that a credible, independent and transparent Guyana Press Association is invaluable in holding both Government and Opposition accountable. If there were a country which Government conducted a long overdue election in which a small group of incumbents illegally changed voting regulations and produced an inscrutable voters list which not only returned those people to power, but put in place a President whose reelected tenure is bound to surpass constitutionally bound term limits, who was up for yet another term after the renewed incumbency, and who had sole legal control of the Treasury, that country would not fulfil even the minimum governance requirements of a functional democracy. The GPA is presently the organizational equivalent of just such a polity. If there is any campaign to discredit the Guyana Press Association, its executive (immediate past and current) is conducting it.

Yours faithfully,
Ruel Johnson