Dear Editor,
I have seen a letter above the name of Sase Singh in Kaieteur News (July 10) titled ‘Ogunseye is mixing up his facts’ and in the Stabroek News (July 11) under the heading ‘The WPA was not needed to secure a majority for Jagan in 1992’.
From the headline in KN one would have thought that Mr Singh would bring clarity to the issue, but after reading his letter he has added confusion of his own making. Let me start with the state of ‘play’ after the elections results were announced by the Elections Commission.
PPP/C won 28 seats; PNC won 23 seats; WPA won 1 seat, UF won 1 seat, for a total of 53 seats.
For the Regional Elections PPP/C won four regions, these are Regions 2, 3, 5 and 6; PNC won four regions, Regions 1, 4, 7 and 10.
Regions 8 and 9 did not have any outright winner.
Thus without Regions 8 and 9 being decided, the PPP/C had control of 28 national seats and four regional seats that gave them 32 seats.
Mr Singh in his letter gave the PPP/C five regional seats without identifying the regions.
With the PPP/C having control of 32 seats, this is where Mr Ogunseye’s ‘facts’ came in. At this point the PPP/C was in search of a working majority. The WPA was aware that the United Force had agreed to support the PPP/C in Region 9. The WPA looking at all the issues felt it should support the PPP/C to give it a comfortable majority to govern on its return to office. I say, that without the support of the United Force and the WPA, the PPP/C did not have a majority.
The support of the United Force gave the PPP/C the Region 9 seat bringing their total to 33 seats, not 35 seats as Mr Singh said.
The PPP/C and the WPA reached agreement that the WPA would support the PPP/C to get the chairmanship of Region 8, and the WPA would get one of the two NCDLO seats.
The WPA had known since in 1992, it was uncomfortable to govern with a narrow margin as is seen in the current Parliament. With the PPP/C getting the Region 8 charimanship, thus the parliamentary seat, the total was taken to 34 seats. The PPP/C now having control of 6 regions with the assured majority to elect the two NCDLO seats, one NCDLO seat went to a PPP/C member and the other to the WPA’s Matheson Williams.
Mr Singh wrote that by virtue of`the fact that the PPP/C won 53.5% of the popular vote, it was confident of one of the two NCDLO seats. Editor, the percentage of popular votes was never a criterion to determine the NCDLO parliamentary seats. This is a rule Mr Singh has made up.
In the tenth paragraph, Mr Singh says “the WPA with 6,068 votes won one national seat. That left one national seat, two regional seats (Regions 8 and 9) and one NCDLO seat to be decided upon, but this process had nothing to do with the PPP/C securing the majority.”
Editor, what this paragraph tells me is that Mr Singh does not understand the method used to determine seats allocation for the 1992 and 1997 parliaments.
At this stage before the election for the NCDLO seats, the PPP/C had 34 seats.
In Region 1 which the PNC had won, the chairperson at the meeting held to elect the Region parliamentary representative, through the lack of experience caused a PPP/C member to be elected, thus giving the PPP/C 35 seats. No one could have predicted that the PPP/C would have been gifted the parliamentary seat in Region 1.
With the PPP/C getting the other NCDLO seat, it brought their total to 36 seats.
Mr Singh said that Bagot Paul represented the WPA in Parliament. Let me say here that the WPA was never represented by Mr Bagot Paul.
On examining Mr Singh’s letter, you will see he is juggling information to satisfy the 36 seats that the PPP/C had in 1992. In the sixth paragraph, he added one NCDLO seat to 33 seats (which is incorrect) to get 34 seats, then he juggled another NCDLO seat to get 36 seats for the PPP/C; this is in contradiction to the fact that the WPA got one NCDLO seat. Mr Singh obviously did not know how the PPP/C got to 36 seats so he decided to use the three-card device to arrive at the result.
In closing, it is evident Mr Singh wrote his letter using information from internet sources which carried errors.
Yours faithfully,
Ali Majeed
