The Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) has expressed satisfaction with the outcome of the 2015 General and Regional Elections even as it criticizes all other aspects of the electoral process and calls for electoral reforms.
GHRA in a press release congratulated the APNU+AFC coalition “for winning an electoral victory without recourse to manipulation of ethnic insecurity, and for the statesperson-like manner in which it managed tensions of the past few days.”
Noting that this will be the “first time, since 1953, that Guyana will be governed by a coalition of parties committed to representing the ethnic diversity of the nation,” GHRA said in “this respect the Coalition for Change, by the narrowest of margins, has won a historic victory.” The association noted that this was the only aspect of the election process with which it found satisfaction.
“The electoral process was a mirror image of its three immediate predecessors in 2001, 2006 and 2011” the release states. In these three elections “ethnically provocative campaigns were followed by peaceful polling which then spiraled downwards into tension, frustration and anger.”
GHRA expressed the hope that “the accumulated recommendations for reform and improvements to the electoral system made by Observer Missions and local civic organizations over the past decade will prove to be a tipping point in 2015 and provide the momentum for much needed reform in the new parliamentary era.”
The association also noted in the release that “while the overall impact of young people on this election remains to be assessed… their manifest interest in this electoral process bodes well for the future, putting all politicians on notice that political life will require much more engagement with the public than the exclusive club it has been in the past.”
It further said that it is hopeful that “the combination of a new government committed to national unity and a new generation of politically alert young people will encourage healthy political debate about the future of the society, progressively freeing public life from the suffocating dominance of ethnicity.”Were this to take place, it said, “the legacy of the Coalition for National Unity will then be to have removed the major impediment to progress in Guyana for the past sixty years”.
The association also expressed the hope that “the resistance of the opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) to the elections results will quickly dissolve and spare the nation further vexation.”
