Dear Editor,
To properly understand the gravity of David Granger’s gambit pertaining to the appointment of the Chairman of GECOM, one must walk back to the year 1985. Forbes Burnham had died in August 1985 and he was succeeded by Desmond Hoyte. Guyana in 1985 was hoping for a fresh wind of change with Burnham’s death. The PNC dictator was dead and that development presented the nation with a golden opportunity to repair itself. The holding of free and fair elections and elections free from fear in December 1985 was the first imperative to put Guyana back on the progressive path.
Unfortunately, Hoyte stubbornly refused to budge on any of the prerequisites to hold free and fair elections. Although as a former Minister of Finance, he was aware of the situation where the nation was in a race to the bottom, he refused to institute reforms. Some insiders told me that he was afraid of the PNC strongmen at that time. Thus he complied with the “diktats” of those strongmen. He refused to count the ballots at the place of polls. And most importantly he refused to demolish the system where the Elections Commission Chairman was unilaterally appointed by the Head of State without consulting anyone.
At that time we had an Elections Com-mission Chairman called Harry Bollers who was nothing but a post box or a glorified rubber stamp. His role was just to pass documents and messages between interested parties.
The end result from this immoral structure was that those 1985 elections turned out be the most rigged, manipulated and crooked elections in the entire history of Guyana.
Since then the majority of this nation, (not only the PPP), including non-political players like the Electoral Assistance Bureau, the Private Sector, the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, along with friends of democracy in the Diaspora, the International Community, the Carter Center among others, were able to leverage the powers of the United States of America to isolate the PNC political, financially and diplomatically. The situation was made untenable for the PNC cabal to the point that no one internationally wanted to do business with them. Hoyte relented and did the right thing. What Hoyte did in 1990 was that he placed his country first rather than his party and facilitated free and fair elections in 1992.
By and large, this nation, (not the PPP or PNC), took the sensible road to ensure that the Carter-Price Model was instituted for the 1992 elections. In a newspaper article written in the Stabroek News on April 7, 1991, Hoyte was quoted as saying that “he will seriously consider a list of five candidates supplied by the Opposition Leader”. History has shown that Cheddi Jagan provided those names and Hoyte extracted a name – Rudy Collins. All of Guyana (civil society, the political parties and the ordinary man with the full support from our friends in the international community) collectively rejected the 1985 system at that time and there is no reason to believe that my nation thinks differently today. So why is the PNC trying to go back to the 1985 system?
We must all reject this push by the PNC to go back to 1985. What that Carter-Price Model achieved was segregation of duties. In business, if one person selects the contractors, books the transactions, pays the bills, and reconciles the bank accounts, there is a strong possibility that you can very well be robbed because there are no checks and balance in the value chain. That is why in business we insist on segregation of duties to allow the internal control systems to protect the business. Similarly, this act of segregating of duties where the Leader of the Opposition selects the list of six names to submit to the Leader of Govern-ment who then selects one must be seen as one that is inclusive, one that protects the nation from autocratic actions, and one that encapsulated all the key ingredients of democracy.
Yours faithfully,
Sase Singh
