Polling places reduction stacked lopsidedly against voters from PPP/C

Dear Editor,
The GECOM decision to cluster Polling Stations and to force persons to travel long distances to exercise their franchise is revealed as patently unfair upon cursory examination. If one delves deeper, it appears to be stacked lopsidedly against voters from PPP/C strongholds who are being asked to go deep into neighbouring villages where historic rivalries predate politics. Guyana enjoys no immunity from Newton’s Third Law of Motion and accordingly, GECOM’s actions are generating equal and opposite reactions. A movement dubbed #longwalktofreedom has sprung up and has been encouraging persons to travel whatever distance and endure whatever hardships to cast their ballots. In response, persons have asked for protection details for convoys of persons who wish to vote but are fearful of old enmities flaring up on a day known for its testiness and in the present era of high crime. One elder citizen wrote to me that “even David Granger is cognisant of the increased crime wave and has dismissed the TSU protection service offered by the Guyana Police Force and replaced them with a ‘Cohors Prætoria’ of sixty specially trained Guyana Defence Force soldiers as his (Granger’s) personal guard”. The use of Mandela’s slogan to describe the movement to assist persons to vote may not be without significance.
Mandela’s address in Sophiatown, Johannesburg 1953 famously known as No Easy Walk to Freedom was where Mandela signalled his break from the nonviolent protest and struggle as he said there was a need for a new way to take the struggle for the end of apartheid forward: “You can see that there is no easy walk to freedom anywhere, and many of us will have to pass through the valley of the shadow again and again before we reach the mountaintops of our desires. Dangers and difficulties have not deterred us in the past. They will not frighten us now. But we must be prepared for them like men in business who do not waste energy in vain talk and idle action.” The inspiration is clear, the struggle is the same.
In this grim picture set by the GECOM betrayal of its mandate, hope springs with offers from persons in villages where Polling Stations are located to assist in any way to ensure their Guyanese brothers and sisters are not disenfranchised. There is a clear cognisance among the people that we are all in a struggle to regain the rights and freedoms so carefully enshrined in our Constitution that we have come to take for granted for over a generation. As this is being written, GECOM is meeting, whatever their decision, the #longwalktofreedom will move forward, inexorably, stronger together in much more than words. We will vote; be it the easy way or the hard way, it will be done.

Respectfully,
Robin Singh