…racial lashing out
According to the ERC, Desmond Trotman and Gerry Gouveia have kissed and made up over what the ERC seems to feel was a personal spat between the two individuals. You remember the incident, don’t you, Dear Reader? It was back in the middle of last year when the CCJ had just issued its judgements that Granger’s unilateral appointment of James Patterson was illegal and that the NCM that demanded elections since March 22, was legal.
Patterson promptly resigned. But while Granger was dickering with Jagdeo to find a replacement (he insisted the CCJ said he could submit names to himself!!) GECOM CEO Lowenstein unilaterally launched a House-to-House Registration exercise!! Specifically noting that he was writing on behalf of the PSC and upon legal advice, Gouveia informed Lowenfield, “it is our understanding that you have not been legally directed by the Commission to proceed as you are doing, and that to conduct House-to-House Registration is unlawful”. This was even supported by GECOM’s internal legal officer, said Gouveia!!
He then noted that in view of the constitutional requirement for elections to be conducted in 3 months and past H2H exercises had taken over a year, Lowenfield should cancel the H2H Registration. This, as a matter of fact, was the subsequent position of the courts and the H2H was truncated by the new GECOM Chair! But Govt-appointed Commissioner Trotman pounced on the PSC’s advice to blatantly play the race card.
He compared Gouveia to “a white slave owner who, in the presence of his overseers, is penalising a delinquent slave for failing to carry out the instructions of ‘massa’”!! Trotman insisted he could feel the whips of Gouveia’s white slave owner ancestors cracking on HIS ancestors’ backs!! In Trotman’s “apology” – composed at the insistence of the ERC which had been petitioned by the PSC as a racist attack on Gouveia – Trotman merely noted that he hadn’t known that Gouveia’s ancestors weren’t slave owners!!
So if a Guyanese of British heritage had written the missive on behalf of the PSC, Trotman’s racist intervention was OK?? When are going to accept we’re a nation of six peoples – which includes Europeans – and see all as “Guyanese”??
Not until the group Booker T Washington described moves on: “There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays.
Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
…representation
The sugar worker union, GAWU, informed us that they’ve been recognised by the Sugar Corporation for 44 years. They certainly must’ve done some serious damage to their shoulder muscles as they contorted to pat themselves on their back!! Unfortunately, they focused on the past but ignored that following their recognition in 1976, they had their members strike for a historic 135 days to pressure the PNC to pay them their profit-sharing as agreed to in 1974.
In that year, sugar prices spiked and their share of the profits amounted to US$85 million – an unbelievably large sum in those days. But after all the privations and suffering of the workers, GAWU called off the strike without a penny profit being handed out to the workers!!
In the present, GAWU mentioned their “struggle” since 2015 when 4 factories were shuttered and 7000 workers fired.
Maybe they should elaborate on those “struggles”?
…adherence??
GECOM Chair Claudette Singh said she obeyed the Carter Center’s 2015 advice to avoid private residences as polling places. Maybe she could heed the Center’s present advice to “publicise and distribute existing tabulation procedures for the March 2 elections as widely as possible, including to all political parties?”
That’s been a past rigging node, no?
