We completed local government elections in March 2023. Because the Opposition has a math problem, let us state the obvious – those elections were held just over seven months ago. The Opposition could not challenge one name on the voters’ list. General elections are around the corner, due by the end of 2025. That is just over two years from now. GECOM is currently engaged in another round of constitutionally mandated continuous registration.
The Opposition Leader, Aubrey Norton, held a press conference last week, accompanied by the Leader of the AFC, Khemraj Ramjattan. We will desist from any name-calling. But it was painfully obvious that the AFC Leader was merely there to jump whenever Norton snapped his finger. Just like the AFC between 2015 and 2020, the party only has a name it fools itself with. The truth is that the AFC is nothing other than another faction of the PNC. When all is said and done, it falls in line with the PNC, regardless of who is the PNC leader.
One of the allegations made by Norton and parroted by Ramjattan is that GECOM, in its continuous registration process, is illegally registering Venezuelans. The Attorney General, Anil Nandlall, debunked this allegation, deeming it “outlandish and outrageous”. Indeed, both these so-called main Opposition leaders made no effort to present even an iota of evidence. They merely brazenly and barefacedly stated a claim as if it is fact. One would have thought that they would have produced at least one name as the basis for making such a serious allegation. Even if one name does not validate the claim, at least they could have made a case that, if there is even one name, there is reason to suspect that Venezuelans were being registered on a large scale.
Yet, these persons, experienced as they are and with a battery of lawyers behind them, came out charging GECOM with a crime, and already setting up baseless allegations for the 2025 elections.
This, unfortunately, is the modus operandum (MO) for how the Opposition works. Ramjattan is famous in Guyana and around the world for many such baseless claims, including the very infamous claim that two Russians came to Guyana to rig the 2020 March elections. Which one of us would ever forget the spectacle of Ramjattan and Cathy Hughes, after it became obvious that the PPP won the elections, and after it became clear that the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition had operationalized its election rigging plan, standing in front of cameras saying the Government had identified two Russians who came to rig the elections? According to them, one of the Russians was arrested before the election and deported, and the other one was never found. Up to this day, every Guyanese would like to know who these Russians were, and why Ramjattan kept this a secret until they knew they had lost the election, and that the PNC rigging plan had collapsed.
But Ramjattan’s Russian claims then were like the PNC’s missing Statements of Polls (SOPs). The Russians simply vanished from earth, just like the PNC’s “winning” SOPs. It is like showing up in Washington for a big conference to show the world the evidence of the PPP Government’s genocide against Afro-Guyanese and the PPP Government’s discrimination against Afro-Guyanese, firing them from their jobs, denying them jobs, preventing them from businesses, including getting Government contracts. On arrival in Washington, when they were asked for any evidence they might have had, they told the Washington lawmakers and those who attended their conference that they would provide them later. The lawmakers are still awaiting the SOPs that the PNC had promised them in March 2020.
Just like the Washington lawmakers are no fools, Guyanese citizens are no fools. They know that the PNC-led APNU/AFC has come up with yet another brazen claim for which they have no evidence. It is not even a rumour they heard. They made up the rumour, and now want every Guyanese and the world to accept the rumour they concocted as fact.
For those who are familiar with the process, GECOM could not possibly register anyone without the knowledge of the PNC. Every party has scrutineers for every registration transaction conducted by GECOM. At every continuous registration office, for every registration visit made by GECOM, APNU/AFC/PNC are present. Their scrutineers are paid to be present, just like the PPP scrutineers. It is a transparent process, and every party scrutineer has the right to examine and validate every document presented. Every registrant has biometric data which are validated by a GECOM process, including international checking legitimacy of fingerprints.
None of this means that GECOM officials are above skullduggery. We saw that, in spite of eyes looking on, GECOM senior officials attempted to steal a whole election in 2020. As long as the party representatives are alert and diligent, fraud largely is prevented. No wide-scale illegal registration is possible without party representatives able to accumulate evidence.
We therefore are in the famous SOP jumbie story all over again. Norton and Ramjattan are again shamelessly telling the Guyanese people they will present the evidence when they are ready, on Johnny Mathis’s fictional 12th of Never. We expect Norton to do this. This is his MO. We continue to hope that Ramjattan would find his way back to his PPP days, when truth matters, when we were not slavishly beholden to a PNC leader. There is a name for such behaviour. Bharrat Jagdeo got it right.
