…Caricom effort produce?
Yes…it’s not only the US that was “born on the 4th July!! So was CariCom – which just got a new Chair in the person of Dr Ralph Gonsalves from St Vincent and the Grenadines. Gonsalves didn’t waste any time – or mince any words – in getting to the topic on the minds of every Guyanese and, it seems, every other CariCom leader: Guyana and it’s record breaking elections!!
He described the attacks on his predecessor Mia Mottley by you know who!! – as “unwarranted, vulgar and opportunistic” – for just doing her duty. To wit, upholding the principles of the CariCom Charter of Civil Society, to which Guyana is a signatory. While he called the attackers “jaundiced”, he insisted they “ought to know better”. And when better to let them know this that on our foundational day.
But sadly, all of what Mottley and now Gonsalves had said, and will say, will be like water rolling off ducks’ backs. The PNC has gone rogue on their CariCom colleagues. It’s not like when James Mitchell, the PM of St Vincent, had invited Desmond Hoyte to a meeting at Mustique after he’d massively rigged the 1985 elections. As he told a Hoyte Memorial Lecture here in 2008, even though Hoyte brought along a couple of slickly produced booklets to claim he’d won the elections “fairly” – by bringing over “East Indians voters – the other leaders were quite bemused.
Especially the feisty Eugenia Charles of Dominica – the first woman to be elected PM in the Caribbean. She’d been canvassing her fellow heads to consider expelling Guyana from CariCom, and at Mustique, it was only after Hoyte promised all sorts of reforms going ahead that she pulled the subject off the table. So, it was long before Jimmy Carter’s intervention that our own Caribbean family had stepped up to the plate to stare down Hoyte.
But Granger’s not Hoyte; that Sanctimonious Gangster is all pose with his oleaginous ways. In fact, he’s gone out of his way – along with his fellow gangster Green – to ream into Hoyte for “giving in” to the Americans in 1992. They’d rather he rigged his way and bullied all democrats – like Burnham did, and he, Granger, is now following suit.
But Granger should know that “dis time na laang time”: even the mild-mannered Secretary General LaRocque took time out to point out that he had “every confidence” in the Recount Report the Caricom Observer Mission had produced.
This Report, of course, describes the efforts of the APNU agents and their throwing up of “anomalies” as a “fishing expedition”!!
What your Eyewitness can say for sure is that CariCom under Gonsalves ain’t going away!!
…GECOM Chair decide?
While we’re all waiting for the CCJ to deliver its judgement next Wednesday, let’s not forget that it all comes back to GECOM Chair Claudette Singh. As it was from the very beginning, the ball will again be in her court. As it stands, whether the CCJ says our Appellate Court had jurisdiction or the CCJ has jurisdiction to say whether the Appellate Court had Jurisdiction, nothing can change the fact that, ultimately, the Chair has to get a report of the “valid votes” – nobody disputes this banal statement – cast for the several parties, and make a declaration. Story done!!
Whatever report Lowenfield gives her and her Commission, it’s up to them to scrutinize and fix whatever defect she detects. Just like Alexander did with Lowenfield’s predecessor Gocool Boodhoo back in 2011. The problem is that the Chair has bent backwards to try to be fair to the positions of the PNC…but there’s only so far even a limbo dancer can go.
She’s already declared her position: no Judgement can convert her commission into an Elections Court!!
…PNC’s partners say?
There’d been talk that the PNC was up to its old rigging ways following Granger’s unilateral appointment of James Patterson as GECOM Chair. The WPA and AFC had vowed to quit the coalition is such was true.
Post-Mingo??
