Local government elections were finally run off on Friday after a wait of nearly nineteen years. Following the local polls of 1994, they should have been held in 1997, but were postponed in order for a joint task force comprising the PPP/C and the PNCR to agree on local government legislative reform. That process, which was initially intended to last for a year, dragged on for nearly two decades, and proved so convoluted that the electorate lost track of the story many moons ago. In the end, it produced a mixed system which allowed voters to choose 50% of their representatives in a constituency or first-past-the-post procedure and 50% under the normal Proportional Representation (PR) arrangements. The hope was that it would give residents in constituency areas the opportunity to choose independent candidates, some of whom they might know, and whom they could hold accountable. Under the PR system, of course, voters do not choose the representatives; the political parties or groups do.
Exactly how many voters took the opportunity to mark their X on the ballot paper next to truly independent candidates, as opposed to those who were allied to political parties was not known at the time of writing, although at a press conference yesterday Gecom told the media that independents had a very poor showing. Of course, a low turnout in a constituency where independent candidates were standing under first-past-the-post, might tend to favour the two parliamentary parties, whereas a high turnout would suggest a higher level of interest on the part of the electorate and concomitantly a greater chance of them voting for independents. And as it was, the turnout was low.
Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield yesterday gave an overall turnout figure of 38-39%, which is very poor by Guyana’s standards – at least where national elections are concerned. The CEO’s figure was supplemented by Gecom Commissioner Vincent Alexander, who said that in some areas it was as low as 25%, while in others it was over 50%.
This uneven pattern also appears to have been a feature of the 1994 local government election, and while various figures, mostly in the 30s, have been floating around for the turnout on that occasion, the Guyana Election Technical Assessment Report of 1994 gives a more nuanced account. That report says that “voter participation” in 1994 was 47.91% overall, but that Georgetown was much lower at 33.37%. Many other areas, in contrast, recorded turnouts in the high 50s and 60s, but the capital, representing 23% of eligible voters, brought down the overall percentage. The Georgetown figure for Friday’s vote will be awaited with interest.
If it is indeed the case that the overall turnout was 47.91% in the local election twenty-two years ago, then the electorate was even more reluctant to cast ballots this time around. One suspects, as was said last week, that the parties and candidates simply did not do enough leg work. Independent candidates will in many cases simply not be known in a constituency, and they will have to take the time and trouble to introduce themselves to voters and talk to them before the latter will bother to go out and vote for them.
The whole style of local campaigning has to be different from that for a national election, since there will be no big party meetings to excite the crowds. When faced with candidates they did not really know, voters simply put their X next to one or other of the parties they did know. In our report in yesterday’s edition, for example, we quoted one man who lived in Bel Air Park as saying that he didn’t know his constituency’s candidates. “I saw several strange faces on the ballot paper today, as I’m sure many other voters did,” he remarked.
Nowhere was that point seemingly better illustrated than in the case of Constituency 13, where as we reported yesterday, candidate Winston Harding pulled substantial votes at two polling stations. APNU+AFC had withdrawn their support from him after the child molestation allegations against him were made public. At the time of writing it was not known whether he had in fact won the seat, but if he has, the media were given to understand that there was little from a legal point of view the coalition could do about it, except put pressure on him to resign. When President David Granger was asked at his press conference yesterday about what would happen in this eventuality, he indicated that the matter would have to be discussed.
It seems the coalition – although more properly APNU in this instance ‒ did not consider the allegations against Mr Harding as much of an impediment to him standing, given Minister Volda Lawrence’s reaction when confronted with the matter. Leaving aside the issue of Minister Lawrence per se, it shows a contempt for the electorate that the coalition put him up as a candidate in the first place.
If Mr Harding received votes because of the party with which he had initially been associated and not on his own account, there were some independents who were very well known to the voters in their own individual right – Mr Mark Benschop being the prime case in point. Quite clearly, however, he was not seen as a viable candidate by the electorate in the South Ruimveldt area, since according to our report in yesterday’s edition, he was easily overtaken by APNU+AFC. The same is also true of the BIGA group in Bartica.
While full analysis will have to await the release of all the results, ad interim it seems fair to say that in these local government elections the two parliamentary parties won again. There will no doubt be independent pockets scattered here and there, but essentially the voting populace treated the poll as they would a national election. Breaking that political stranglehold, it seems, is not a matter of simply setting up a constituency system alongside the PR one.
