Well, Khemraj Ramjattan must’ve jumped into the air and clicked his heels at the news that the PNC had filed an action in the High Court: for a declaration that the Local Government Elections scheduled for March 13 shouldn’t be held!! And why, pray tell?? Seems the Chief Scrutineer of the PNC – the very feisty Carol Joseph from Reg 5 – prayed (like the legal folks say) on a plethora of grounds. Just to mention one, there’s the claim that the preparation of the voters’ list wasn’t done in accordance with the applicable law. Your Eyewitness will spare you, dear readers, the tedious statement of all the sections and sub-sections of ROPA she invoked!!
Then, for good measure, she also contended that the Register of Voters – from which the Preliminary List of electors is extracted – wasn’t compiled properly. This is really asking the Courts, through the back door, to order house-to-house registration to create a new voters’ list!! How many ways can you try to delay the inevitable?? Looks like the answer – if you’re the PNC – is to pull one rabbit after another from a hat till the fat lady sings!! Which, as indicated above, is March 13!!
But your Eyewitness thinks – to use that phrase that’s now de rigueur when talking about the PNC’s subterfuges – this confounded nonsense gotta stop. Elections are the gatekeepers of democratic governance, and their procedures shouldn’t be reduced to a travesty. The Courts have the discretion of declaring these cases “vexatious” and “frivolous”, and applying sanctions of the litigant – here, the pugnacious Carol Joseph!!
But like boxing legend the Brown Bomber Joe Louis once told Billy Cohn before an impending fight, “You can run, but you can’t hide!” Just as the ring is a circumscribed space, so is an election in time. Come March 13, if the PNC don’t participate in the LGE, they can kiss goodbye to even the little influence they have at the Municipal and NDC levels because of their traditional constituency. Who would then throw their bodies in front of gates and doors to futilely try to stop the PPP juggernaut??
But the PNC fully well know what’s in store for them if they go down the road of not contesting the LGE – oblivion. Hence, unlike the AFC, which are already “Dead Meat” – they’ve submitted the symbol to GECOM that they’ll use in the elections. They know that all their huffing and puffing ain’t stopping no LGE – but they’re just “tryin’ a t’ing”!! And it’s because of this, more than anything else, that the Courts should slap them down real hard. If the courts do not, the PNC’s cynicism would percolate into ordinary folks, and the next think you know, they’ll move from disobeying traffic Police ranks to killing their own family members.
But hold it!! We’re there already!!
…morality?
Believe it or not, the dominant view of those who’re supposed to dispense justice to ‘we, the people’, is that there ain’t no morality in the law!! And so we shouldn’t get too outraged at some of the actions that pass muster nowadays. Take the case of those Carbon Credits we were allocated two days ago. As somebody put it, it’s tantamount to paying someone to not smoke, so you can keep on smoking!!
Now, my virtuous behaviour shouldn’t have anything to do with you sinning, should it?? The bottom line is: if smoking’s a bad thing for the people around us, no one should be allowed to smoke!! It’s immoral for those with money to literally get away with murder. But since the law allows it, Guyana would be foolish not to go along and at least benefit our poor citizens who’re mired in poverty??
While some might say that we must stand for principle – we gotta be pragmatic.
…work ethics?
From time immemorial, it has been literally beaten into us that we should enjoy only that which we worked for. So, the thought of just doling out oil money to folks just for staying at home is difficult to digest.
