Mingo’s attempt to manipulate the election was a failed last minute improvisation by the PNC. Not to be outdone, since then the PPP has been improvising with a similar level of success. The failure of the PNC to use its time in government to fulfill its core manifesto promise to constitutionally entrench its main African constituency in government and the party’s greater degree of institutional and street power gave rise to the view that it would not easily demit office. Rooting this perspective in the PNC’s history of electoral manipulations, the PPP weaponised its friends and the international community for a quick kill immediately after elections day if its massive mobilisation effort should succeed. However, rather than ceding power to the PPP, the PNC has attempted to destroy their unspoken conspiracy by accumulating prima facie evidence and accusing the PPP of elections manipulation. The PPP is in no position to reciprocate and has ever since been having its own Mingo moment: improvising to keep a corrupt process alive. Both parties usually engage in substantial elections manipulations that subvert the democratic rights of the Guyanese people and neither deserves to emerge from this debacle with a win.
The main and essentially weak arguments of the PPP are that: from the votes in the boxes it won the elections and the Constitution gives GECOM the right only to count/recount and tabulate those votes and declare the winner of the elections; the activities on elections day were sufficient to validate the votes in the boxes; all the observer groups certified the elections as clean; the wrongdoings claimed by others are fictions of their imaginations; GECOM does not have the right or investigative machinery to determine the validity of votes even if complaints are brought to its notice before it has determined the outcome of the elections; it is absurd for GECOM to determine upon the taintedness of votes; the job of determining if votes are illegal/invalid must be left to the courts by way of an elections petition, and the CEO of GECOM must follow GECOM’s directions.
In February 2019, North Carolina’s elections 5 member bipartisan board (commission) unanimously ordered a new election for a U.S. House of Representatives 9th Congressional District seat after officials claimed that corruption surrounding absentee ballots had tainted the results of a 2018 vote. The chairman of the board Bob Cordle said “the corruption” and “absolute mess” with absentee ballots had cast doubt on the entire contest. ‘It certainly was a tainted election … The people of North Carolina deserve a fair election.’ Republican Mark Harris’s request for a new vote came after he spent months trying to fend off a rerun. He led Democrat Dan McCready by 905 votes out of 282,717 ballots cast on November 6, ‘but elections officials refused to certify him the winner because of allegations of irregularities in the vote’ (POLITICSFEBRUARY 21, 2019 / 9:16 AM / A YEAR AGO North Carolina orders new U.S. House election after ‘tainted’ vote Andrew Hay).
With the exception of being able to nullify the elections, all that the PPP is claiming that GECOM had to or cannot do has been done in the USA, one of the bastions of democracy. We shall see how the Caribbean Court of Justice rules but I have come upon no law that prevents GECOM from investigating allegations of voter fraud and making appropriate recommendations.
Furthermore, as we lambaste the CEO of GECOM we should note that while public officers must generally comply with the directions of their superiors, they cannot be directed to break the law. This was made pellucid during the Nuremburg trials after the Second World War. Liberal democracy is not of one type that fits all situations and the time has long passed when our ethnicist leaders should have eschewed flimsy arguments about democratic rights and have negotiated a way out of this impasse.
As for elections observers, they have been proven wrong on many occasions and if the international community had spent a fraction of the effort they are now expending in trying to keep a highly dysfunctional, winner-takes-all, political system in place in trying to encourage the political players to adopt processes that best suit Guyana, we may have had a flourishing democracy today. True, there have been some periodic token statements about the need for radical change but that is where the story has ended. I am not one of those who believe that the West wants to keep Guyana unstable and poor: what would be the point of that in an interlinked world where coronavirus here is coronavirus there! The notion that the rich world wants our oil or anything else is even more ridiculous when all we possess – including our people as 85% of our graduates migrate – is for sale and not only do they have the wealth to buy but sometimes even determine the price at which we sell. As for oil, had he been alive in this era of climate concerns, the late Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Dr. Eric Williams would have come to realise that oil does indeed spoil.
That said, it appears to me that the PNC’s desperate gambit has not only left the PPP staggering but has presented the West with a major challenge at a time when a new cold war between liberal democracy and authoritarianism is brewing. ‘Competition between great powers is over nothing less than the future democratic character of the international system. …. the democracies find themselves losing ground internationally to authoritarian powers bent on breaking the hold of the democracies on the character of the international order (https://www.brookings.edu/ research/democracy-disorder-the-struggle-for-influence-in-the-new-geopolitics/. As a result, the US and its Western allies have been spending huge sums on promoting democracy. In 1990, the US spent a mere US$200m on promoting democracy, but about US$3.3b in 2010 and some US$2.8b in 2017 (fas.org).
While generally useful, elections monitoring is also an important aspect of this struggle and Guyana’s unusual behaviour places it in the eye of this global political storm. Furthermore, located next to what the West considers an intransigent autocratic Venezuelan regime, it induces the prospect of a domino effect that will undermine western democratic values. In this kind of struggle, good national sense, political, legal and all other processes are thrown to the wind as are the interests of those Afro-Guyanese the PNC represents. Don’t forget that the interests of Indo-Guyanese were similarly sacrificed for some three decades in the first round of the global battle!
The West has a long institutional memory and should have known that in Guyana’s ethnic context where governments are changed by small majorities, the bloated electoral list gave both parties and others the opportunity to manipulate the elections. But perhaps it thought it need not bother with such trivia: international and local pressure would force the ‘loser’ to succumb. Typical of this sort of Western intervention, ‘unintended consequences’ resulting from their failure to properly assess the degree of ethnic alienation kicked in and the situation has become a major embarrassment. After spending so much on promoting democracy how could in one of the poorest countries in the region, among other things, over 4,800 persons were said to have voted by way of impersonation?
In this context, the PNC has to be wrong! Not essentially because the West loves the PPP or hates the PNC: love Indians and hate Africans but because they badly miscalculated: their reputation and fundamental Western interests are at stake! Unfortunately, our egotistical and self-interested leaders are not focusing on the bigger game and what is good for Guyana!
