Dear Editor,
The editorial of the Stabroek News of Monday, February 25, 2019 is really a polemic exercise. It challenges the constitutional orthodoxy that drives the engine and operations of GECOM.
Your hysterical heading screams this ugly canard: `Democracy at risk’. This advances in aid by inference the untruth that the Chairman has been in cahoots with the government commissioners to destabilize the democratic processes by which the Commission operates. Not true. For decades, too much to count, I have kept a safe disinfected distance from active politics.
Editor, constitutional democracy was not at risk when President Granger “handpicked” me as Chair-man of GECOM. His Excellency acted, as was his right, in his own deliberate judgment and in accordance with the law. So says the Guyana Court of Appeal. There is yet to be a final pronouncement on this issue, I am advised, by the Caribbean Court of Justice. When it arrives, I trust that we will all abide by its pronouncement. Your unbalanced and maladroit Editorial grudgingly admitted that GECOM was well within its rights to act as it did.
Mine is a prayer that the ethnic rumbles which have intruded in the body politic with an ineffable zeal be destroyed and banished forever. Editorials sometimes overstep their enthusiasm and unwittingly land into territory which deprive the body politic of a harvest of hope. Yours is such a one. This may be an uncharacteristic misstep. We applaud the fourth estate of its courage and tenacity it sometimes demonstrates. On this occasion, you have overreached and faltered. The pen, very often, is the master of the sword and can sometimes cause similar mayhem. I will continue to read your editorials as usual.
For the removal of all doubt, be it known that this Chairman is a paladin for no one and his deportment in his execution of the Office of Chairman would be defined by the Oath of Office which was taken. The world is looking at Guyana much the same way as a thief “sizes up” treasure. Now is not the time nor season to spawn and exacerbate peccadilloes and gratuitous incivilities.
Yours faithfully,
Justice (Ret’d) James Patterson
Chairman
Guyana Elections Commission
