Dear Editor,
The hardliners in the PNC have taken to the position of instructing the APNU+AFC that House-to-House Registration is mandatory. It is clear that there is no respect for the Constitution in the PNC Camp. I was sent a piece from the PNC newspaper (the New Nation) captioned “House-to-House Registration is a must.” In that PNC-sponsored piece, their position is that the Guyanese voters list is padded, the nation cannot hold free and fair elections with such a list and that Guyana is an outlier in the world with a “population of less than 800,000 people and a voters list of more than 500,000.”
But how accurate is the PNC leadership on this matter? First off, Guyana can afford to hold an elections where over 500,000 names are on its voters list because this is not an abnormality that can prevent free and fair elections. If one reflects on the situation in the Caribbean, they will see Guyana has one of the lower percentages of its population on the voters list compared to places like Trinidad. So who are the PNC leadership trying to fool?
The fact remains – GECOM is fully empowered to hold free and fair elections if Mr. Granger calls a date before April 30, 2019. But as we saw from the latest talks between Mr. Jagdeo and the PNC leader, Mr. Granger is not committed to the process of Constitutional Rule. Rather he is leveraging his partnership with the current Chairman of GECOM to perpetuate an unconstitutional imposition on the people. Every day that goes by, the GECOM Chairman is appearing more and more as an extension of the PNC. This is a dangerous development that brings back dark memories of the tenure of Harold Bollers and Ronald Jacobs.
The Patriotic Coalition for Democracy wrested from the PNC in 1990 a set of reforms that brought an end to electoral shenanigans and serves today to protect the people from these sorts of PNC electoral mischief that the nation saw firsthand during the period 1968-1985. The most important of these reforms was the counting of the ballots at the place of the poll which is the key bastion of fairness in the Guyanese electoral system.
These elections are not about the PNC or the PPP, this is about a people standing tall in this world and telling all, we are a free people who act with integrity and high morality and we follow the rule of law. As we can all see every day since December 21, 2018, Guyana has lost its way and this latest meeting between Mr. Jagdeo and Mr. Granger confirmed this situation. I can comfortably say that I told them so when I wrote a letter to the press captioned `There was nothing for Mr. Jagdeo and Mr. Granger to meet about’. Mr Granger is nothing but the same old PNC man using the same old PNC playbook launched by Mr. Burnham when he declared in 1976 at Sophia that the “State is but an arm of the party.” I trust Mr. Jagdeo has learnt his lesson. Mr. Granger is not a man to be trusted.
Yours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh
