Two weeks after the election of a new Management Committee for the Guyana Public Service Cooperative Credit Union (GPSCCU), several members are now saying that there were irregularities in the election process.
The members, who include executive members of the Guyana Public Service Union (GPSU), told a press conference on Monday that the event flew in the face of the rules of the GPSCCU and was in conflict with the Cooperative Societies Act.
They, however, are not sure about their next move as they have no confidence in the acting Chief Co-operative Development Officer (CCDO) and the Ministry of Labour.
“There is no provision for an acting CCDO, so we don’t acknowledge such a person. Also a letter of protest to the Ministry serves as nothing other than a record,” GPSU First Vice President Dawn Gardener said in response to questions from this newspaper.
Stabroek News understand that the acting CCDO and his staff supervised the election with Minister of Labour Joe Hamilton visiting at least one polling station while the Guyana Credit Union League also observed.
“All of these bodies signed off on the elections and now two to three weeks later we are hearing something else,” a source familiar with the process lamented. According to the source, who asked not to be named, the matter is settled.
The GPSCCU is currently led by a committee elected on April 11. This committee is comprised of the members of an Interim Management Committee installed in 2018. This newspaper understands that they were given a mandate by just about 1,000 of the credit union’s 23,000 membership.
The elections, which were unofficially billed as a GPSU vs IMC event, also saw virtual voting in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The process for this virtual voting and its execution followed by a fully virtual Annual General Meeting, where the votes were counted in a reportedly nonstandard manner, have resulted in the GPSU candidates who lost the elections crying foul.
According to Ivelaw Henry, a GPSCCU member since 1979, members did not receive sufficient notice of the meeting nor was there, in his opinion, sufficient effort made to facilitate attendance of enough members at the virtual meeting.
“The notice of the Annual General Meeting and Agenda was first published once in the print media on Wednesday, 31 March, 2021, where the general membership of the GPSCCU was given eight working days’ notice of the meeting. Eligible members interested in contesting elected positions on the Committee of Management and/or Supervisory Committee were only given one-day notice for related nominations, where a notice was issued on the March 31st, 2021 and nomination opened and closed on 1 April 2021,” he lamented.
Gardener, who also contested elections, explained that while “virtual voting” was allowed, Cooperative Society regulations specify that each member shall exercise their vote in person.
Taking aim at the process for the casting of ballots, they claimed that there was neither a posted list of the persons registered to vote virtually, nor was there any means of knowing or reconciling those who voted or those who did not vote.
“The checks and balances within the proposed system were not communicated to members to provide a basis for transparency,” they lament.
Former GPSCCU Board Chair Patricia Went also complained that at no time did the returning officer state the votes won for any individual candidate.
“They called no names. The ballots were counted by numbers they called out… The IMC members were listed first on the ballot, so I guess they were referring to them. If one was missing they would say vote for 1-12 except 3. No names ever,” Went declared, before adding that there is still no information on the number of votes cast for each candidate at each polling place.
Asked why these objections were not raised immediately after the elections, Gardener said they were “gathering information.” “We needed to be sure of our information before we went public,” she stressed.
