Dear Editor,
In the midst of a highly divided GECOM and the not too disguised threat of “no registration, no elections”, Chairperson Justice Claudette Singh has offered something of a compromise by terminating the exercise while accepting the information on registrations to date for purposes of the long overdue elections. According to a statement coming out of GECOM yesterday, the product of this wasteful exercise, clearly driven by suspect motives, is to be merged with the existing National Register of Registrants Database.
Implicit in this decision is the optimistic and naive presumption that that exercise was properly conducted with all the attendant legal safeguards. From all the evidence, this is not the case. In a perfect world, the product of that exercise should have been scrapped altogether. It was a prohibitively expensive and unnecessary exercise (although it was not strictly unconstitutional), one which was poorly supervised – on the evidence available – by an equally poorly managed GECOM.
Justice Singh is probably unaware of the complexity and difficulties of merging two lists in which any variance affecting any single name, will require extensive further work. For example, in the case of a single individual, there could be several rejections: the order of a person’s full name, the spelling of any one of those names, addresses, fingerprints, etc.
And what if the exercise has produced names of persons not eligible to be on the list? It is unreasonable and wishful thinking to believe that any claims and objections exercise, no matter how extensive, is going to be able to ferret such names. It is far easier and less prone to errors for the Claims and Objections exercise to result in insertions rather than the reverse.
Also, it cannot escape any reasonable person that in addition to the systemic flaws in the house-to-house exercise conducted under the pen of the unconstitutionally appointed James Patterson, we now have two classes of persons: those who were so registered and those who were not. Such a situation would be completely unacceptable in any country with a normal government and a more responsible, impartial and less partisan Elections Commission. And what about those ID Cards which GECOM unlawfully declared would be unlawful? Would there now be two sets of ID cards, the James Patterson’s discredited cards and the previous, lawful cards?
The hard decision forced on the Chairperson means further and more costly delays which this lame duck Government would exploit to its advantage. Yet, while I do not agree with Justice Singh’s decision, I find it painfully understandable.
Justice Singh has partly done what was expected of her. We the citizens must now do whatever we can to prevent the further abuse of the Constitution. We need to do this even if it means having to pay costs for our efforts to protect not only the Consti-tution but democracy.
According to the June 18 ruling of the Caribbean Court of Justice, September 18 is the last day for the lawful existence of the Granger APNU+AFC Government. Unfor-tunately, the CCJ was timid in its consequential orders and declarations, preferring to hide behind glossy words. Fortunately for those judges, they do not have to live under the consequences of their timidity. We do. So it is up to us the citizens of Guyana to ensure that Guyana’s democracy does not slip by a single day longer.
Yours faithfully,
Christopher Ram
