President Bharrat Jagdeo is questioning a high court order instructing the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to allocate funds equitably to the political parties for scrutineering during the national house-to-house registration exercise.
Responding to questions at a press conference he hosted at State House yesterday, Jagdeo asked, “How could the court tell GECOM to spend money that Ashni Singh provides on a discretionary basis, or who to give to?”
The AFC and GAP-ROAR, which filed a court action against GECOM, had argued that the commission had the power and obligation under the constitution and the election laws to allocate on a proportional basis the monies provided by parliament for scrutineering activities.
Meanwhile Jagdeo told the media that the court was taking on the powers of the Minister of Finance, Dr Ashni Singh, about spending money and who it should be given to.
He said that the $100 million allocated for the scrutineers of the political parties to monitor the registration exercise was “not funds that are appropriated. They haven’t gone through the parliament and appropriated specifically for scrutineers. It is provided by the state on a discretionary basis because we want to ensure that the exercise is done transparently.”
The state agreed that half of the funds would go to the ruling party, the PPP/C, and the other half to the opposition parties, maintaining that there had been a failure on the part of the opposition political parties to reach agreement among themselves on how to divide the $50 million allocation.
Expressing concern at the court order of Justice Jainarayan Singh instructing GECOM to apportion monies equitably to the parliamentary parties to offset scrutineering expenses, the President said that “the decision would not stand anywhere.” He added, “I don’t know what is happening to some of these judges. I don’t know.”
He reiterated that the funding for the scrutineers was a consequence of “the benevolence” of the state and because there should be no excuse about the list when the registration exercise had been completed.
Stating that paying the scrutineers was not a matter for GECOM, Jagdeo said that GECOM had to pay its staff to do the registration and they must register people in an honest way with internal processes for cleaning up.
“The scrutineering exercise is not GECOM’s mandate. It is because we said that as a political initiative we want to ensure that the political parties would be watching GECOM and they would not complain.”
The AFC at a press conference on Friday said that it was being forced to withdraw from mounting scrutineers for the registration exercise which begins tomorrow, because GECOM was ignoring the court order.
Meanwhile, GECOM has filed an appeal against the high court order.
AFC Chairman, Khemraj Ramjattan said that GECOM needed to be reminded that they were servants of the people and had no authority to disregard the orders of the court.
The party’s Leader Raphael Trotman said that with the deliberate attempt to refuse the party the right to participate in the process, the AFC reserved the right to condemn the list born out of the process in the future. (Miranda La Rose)
