Dear Editor,
I am obliged to respond to Henry Jeffrey’s letter ‘Justice demands GECOM deprive PPP/C of any opportunity to benefit from bloated list’ published in SN on November 9, 2019.
I start out by asking, why would the PPP want to ‘win,’ as Jeffrey implied, an election on the basis of a bloated list?
Such a misadventure on the part of the PPP or any party for that matter, would be tantamount to shooting themselves in the foot or, as the older folk would say, cutting their nose to spoil their face.
These days, with so many eyes watching elections preparations from beginning to end, is Jeffrey’s call to justice remotely possible in these modern times?
I doubt it. He is therefore creating dragons in the sky.
Jeffrey’s appeal to justice, should not be applicable exclusively to the PPP, it is applicable to all the parties including his. No party should benefit from a bloated list.
Mr. Jeffrey claims that the PPP may have won previous elections because it benefited from a bloated list.
But again, other than being anecdotal, he provides no evidence to validate this misguided contention.
Come on Dr. Jeffrey, pray tell us, how with a rules-based electoral system so precisely drilled down since 2001, can such an occurrence take place.
Please give us the answers to these questions to disabuse the public’s perception that your argument is a strong and not a weak one.
Mr. Jeffrey must be aware of the implications his claim carries, that it was GECOM who embraced a bloated list favourable to the PPP since 2008.
Wittingly or unwittingly, his argument has brought the entire GECOM machinery into disrepute by imputing that it was in a conspiracy with the PPP administration not only to concoct a bloated list but to use it year after year, without detection, to sustain the Party’s electoral fortunes.
How much more laughable can this argument get?
Surely, Mr. Jeffrey cannot be suggesting that the entire GECOM machinery was in concubinage with the PPP to the extent that GECOM blithely allowed itself to be used and abused by giving succour, to a bloated list.
Mr. Jeffrey pretends he is unaware that the bloated list he referred to is in fact, the handiwork of GECOM’S CEO. Mr. Lowenfield knows about its origin, he was the one who created it and kept it alive for eleven long years.
Further, in case Mr. Jeffrey has forgotten, during the period 2001 to 20016, Mr Steve Surujbally was Chairman of GECOM while Gocool Boodoo and later, Keith Lowenfield respectively, were the Chief Election Officers (CEO) at that body.
If we are to take Mr. Jeffrey’s bloated list argument to its logical conclusion, we will have to conclude that Messrs. Surujbally, Boodoo, Lowenfield and Alexander and Corbin and are all guilty of gross dereliction of duty.
But that is not all. The big question is: why should GECOM’S failure to recognize and deny the use of a bloated list be shifted from GECOM to the PPP as Mr. Jeffrey so mischievously tried to do.
According to Mr. Jeffrey, the bloated list originated ‘under the PPP’s watch’ but he failed to define what he meant by a bloated list.
Is Mr. Jeffrey’s definition of a bloated list that the population was less than the list of electors, as was the case in one of the OECS countries or, is he suggesting that because names like Arthur Chung or Viola Burnham and other such names of deceased kept appearing over and over on each Official List of Electors (OLE) that it meant that the list was bloated?
In case Mr. Jeffrey didn’t know, let me remind him that under the PPP’s watch in general and my watch in particular, every month beginning from October 20O1 to October 2015, names of all those persons whose deaths had been registered at the General Register Office (GRO) were despatched to the Office of GECOM’S CEO for his attention.
In fact, this action by the GRO was the continuation of a practice that started way back.
Mr. Jeffrey might recall that there was a time when Mr. Lowenfield had received specific returns for Mr Chung and Mrs Burnham, along with many others, yet he refused to delete the names from the National Register of Registrants (NRR) claiming he was not in receipt of the prescribed documentation when in fact he was.
This particular matter became a matter for public discourse so much so that the GRO was obliged to issue a public statement clarifying its position on the matter.
The GRO’s statement exposed the duplicity of Mr. Lowenfield who, on the one hand, had the relevant documentation reflecting the deaths registered at the GRO, but nevertheless, kept stating that he was not in receipt of returns from the GRO and therefore could not remove such names from the NRR.
Consequently, GECOM ended up being the sole proprietor and keeper of a bloated list.
Herein lies the genesis of the bloated list and its architect.
As the saying goes ‘Whatever is in the dark must come to light.’
The chickens have come home to roost.
His call to GECOM to ‘deprive PPP/C of any opportunity to benefit from bloated list’ should have read ‘deprive ALL parties any opportunity to benefit from a bloated list.’
Yours faithfully,
Clement J. Rohee
