By Ryhaan Shah
No one disputes that the People’s National Congress (PNC) plan – the Nassau Plan? – to fix themselves a victory at the polls in 2020 is in full play. The dictator Forbes Burnham employed no subtlety about his rigging. He had no need to. It wasn’t just that he had the full support of the US and UK Governments but that he had created an Army – the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) – to ensure his security against any revolt, and the Army was itself pivotal to the rigging. GDF soldiers were deployed to seize legal ballot boxes which were dumped and replaced by fake ballots and the Ballot Box Martyrs Bholanath Parmanand and Jagan Ramessar were killed by soldiers in 1973 while defending the sanctity of the ballots.
Burnham’s successor, Desmond Hoyte, outdid his comrade leader and gave himself over 80 per cent of the votes. It was reported that when Hoyte’s boxes were opened for the count, the fake ballots were still held together by rubber bands!
The dead voted during that time and Burnham had also introduced overseas voting as a rigging strategy. A British documentary had exposed the scam by showing addresses of “voters” that were nothing more than vacant lots. But the PNC never cared. Their power was indomitable and Caricom leaders looked the other way whether through racial solidarity or through fear of intimidation by the US Government.
This fraud continued until the fall of the Berlin Wall, brought about a change to US foreign policy. The first free and fair elections in nearly three decades in 1992 gave the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) a convincing win.
It is Guyana’s ongoing tragedy that there has been no move by either of the major political parties to create an inclusive/shared system of Government where all groups, races, and ethnicities would have equitable representation. To do that would require accepting that the country’s most egregious issue is its ethnic/racial divide. Our politicians are still to get there. They prefer the untruth that their respective party represents a cross section of the populace and that lie, more than any other, continues to destroy our country.
Each side wants the spoils for themselves and this selfishness makes us vulnerable to political meddling from powerful international players. Thus, the PNC was leveraged into power in 2015 through the creation of the AFC which garnered enough Indian votes to give the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) coalition a win.
The AFC has lost all support but the PNC is to be kept in place and rather than engaging in good-faith dialogue to secure a shared/inclusive Government, fraud and unlawfulness continue to be the PNC’s preferred modus operandi even as all religious tenets and natural laws bear out that no good is ever built on a rotten core.
The PNC’s last dictatorship was evidence of that and their current plan was in play from the instant Granger took office. Creating the Ministry of Citizenship was the first step. The green, fortress-like walls that have gone up around the Ministry of the Presidency where that Ministry is housed might be consciousness of the skulduggery that is afoot within.
The Opposition raised questions in Parliament about the sudden jump in the number of Haitians currently in the country, the figure increasing from several hundred arrivals and departures in recent years to 6660 arrivals as of April 2018 with some 5485 Haitians now in Guyana.
Minister Nicolette Henry’s attempt at a red herring when she pointed to a 30 per cent non-departure rate for Bangladeshi arrivals was rightly pilloried. The number of arrivals and departures for Indians and Bangladeshis are in the hundreds and the raw numbers are not comparable to the thousands of recent arrivals from Haiti.
In a letter to the press, PPP MP Gail Teixeira noted reports that Haitians are met at the Cheddi Jagan International Airport, escorted to waiting vehicles and are given “safe passage” through Guyana after being furnished with Guyanese documents – birth certificates, ID cards, etc – which are left here. They are kept at the Ministry of Citizenship for future use?
But the plot thickens even more. PPP/C Guyana Elecions Commission (GECOM) Commissioner Bibi Shadick reported to the press that during a statutory meeting, GECOM Chair James Patterson said that a pie chart showing the ethnic composition of GECOM’s staff was provided by “a source” outside of GECOM raising concerns that the integrity of GECOM’s data is compromised and is being made available to agencies outside of GECOM. For what purpose?
While Burnham and Hoyte were rather crude with their systems of rigging, Granger seems intent on providing a more sophisticated take on how to rig an election.
