Dear Editor,
Why does GECOM have to recount all 10 regions? All they have to recount are the votes of the polling stations for which Mr Mingo changed the procedure. Then resume verification of the Statements of Poll, for which we have already paid GECOM to train and employ people to compile and reconcile transparently on Election Day, using the ballot security features, for which we also had to pay.
And who was watching the ballot boxes while the presumably trained Mr Mingo was committing his brazen errors? GECOM who aided and abetted him? Several times I submitted myself for training as a returning officer (RO) for GECOM and wrote exams. I have said before and I say again, the results of those exams were denied me. I was once selected to be a polling clerk and never ever selected again. I wonder what training Mr Mingo had, what his exam results were like, and what the results of the other candidates were like.
I have been a long-serving educator in this country, including 21 years at the University of Guyana (UG) (from where I retired in 2003). While teaching large classes in Natural Sciences there, I was told that many students were scared to be in those classes, because I insisted they demonstrate sufficient competence in the subject for them to be unloaded into responsible positions in society. UG always let them know their grades; and I afforded them the opportunity to know their marks and see where they went wrong, so that they could become convicted of the right way to do those things. The Guyanese who submitted themselves to all educational disciplines afforded by the country ought to become convicted of the rightness of the election results.
I was surprised that a David Granger-led government could go along with these election malpractices. He had employed my services just before the millennium to get the phases of the moon for a Heritage Calendar he was publishing. We did not have internet then, and available computers were not what they are now, but I delivered an accurate set of moon phases for the next year’s calendar to meet the printing deadline. I was the only person remaining in the country capable of performing calculations (and regrettably, still am, in these days of ready internet information) to generate such data. Mr Granger the scholar recognised my scholarship. Why couldn’t he overrule those in his parties that wanted to make us look stupid in calculating a simple majority?
The same goes for GECOM Commissioner Vincent Alexander, whose erudition I used to value while on the UG Academic Board. Surely Mr Alexander knows that the right thing to do is not to use the insufficiencies of the extant legislation to litigate political time, but to do what I recommend at the start of this letter. Come on gentlemen, restore democracy, honesty and decency, and retake your places as elder statesmen in Guyanese history.
Yours faithfully,
Alfred Bhulai
Local Elections Observer
Transparency Institute Guyana Inc (TIGI)
