At long last – two years and three months after that blatant and shameless attempt to rig our elections – the CoI appointed by President Ali will begin taking evidence from witnesses to the sordid affair on Friday. Knowing ahead of time that the PNC/APNU/AFC combine will go all out to discredit the work of the Commission, the President went to great pains to appoint men of the highest credibility. These are: retired Justice John; former Attorney General, High Court Judge, and acting Justice of Appeal in the Eastern Caribbean, Godfrey P. Smith SC; and former Chancellor (ag), of the Guyana Judiciary, Carl Singh.
Justice John will chair the Commission, while Dr Nasim Zaidi, former Chief Election Commissioner of India; and Dr Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, former Chairman of the Ghana Elections Commission, would serve as resource personnel. The last two experts have a wealth of direct experience of these elections, being the advisors to the GECOM Chair throughout the rape of the safeguards protecting our electoral system. Your Eyewitness predicts that the Opposition will go after the one local person on the Commission – Justice Carl Singh – since they consider him as PPP-friendly. And how does your Eyewitness know this?? Well, because they refused to agree to his appointment as Chancellor for twelve years, and booted him out rather unceremoniously in 2017!!
One of the reasons your Eyewitness is happy about this CoI is that he feels that the PPP erred badly when they came into office in 1992, but didn’t investigate all the atrocities committed by the PNC for 28 years – including repeated riggings. The PNC then had the barefacedness not only to deny the riggings that were documented by reputable groups like the British Parliamentary Group under Lord Chitnis (they described the 1980 elections as “more crooked than barbed wire”!!) but, in 1997, claimed the PPP RIGGED THE ELECTIONS!!! Even after the Caricom-approved Justice Cross’s forensic audit proved the claim baseless, they keep on lying about it. Shameless!
While we know that several GECOM officials are before the Courts to determine their culpability and to decide on the appropriate sanctions, the CoI would inquire into all pertinent issues that arose before, during, and after the rigging attempt. They’ll then report their findings, give advice, and make recommendations to the President.
Remember the CoI in the Rodney assassination?? It determined that Burnham was the intellectual author of the dastardly act, and Gregory Smith executed it. Unfortunately, the perpetrators croaked.
It’s widely believed that the GECOM officials didn’t decide to rig the elections on their lonesome. Persons within the administration – who had a vested interest in remaining with their hands in the oil-funded cookie jar – had to have been the intellectual authors!!
Let the chips fall where they may!!
…into poverty
The World Bank released some data on poverty in Guyana that the Opposition Leader – struggling to retain some relevance in the face of the Pres Ali Juggernaut rolling over his support base – jumped on to score some points. But all he did was to illustrate how out-of-touch he is with both economics and the country he wants to lead. The report said, “Poverty in Guyana, measured using the upper-middle income poverty line (US$5.50 per day PPP) has dropped from close to 61 % in 2006 to around 48% in 2019, but was still among the highest in Latin America and Caribbean region.”
The data ended in 2019, when the PNC was still in office! While the World Bank didn’t have later poverty data, they did point out that “Extraordinary economic growth of 20-40 percent over the last two years brought GDP per capita to over $9,300 in 2021, from about $6,600 in 2019.” Clearly the poverty rates have decreased from that economic growth!!
The LoO’s grasping at straws!!
…into the Mother Country’s state
We all know that Indian-Origin Sunak was brought in to save our erstwhile “Mother Country”. But did you realize 22% of the UK population – 14.5 million people – live in relative poverty??
