Opposition Leader Joseph Harmon has voiced support for the calls for the establishment of an independent panel to select a new Chief Election Officer (CEO) for the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) even as he opined that some of the identified applicants are a “no-no.”
Echoing a call by the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) for an independent panel, Harmon said that Guyanese desire a sense of confidence from the elections process, before adding that the Commission sometimes comes up with decisions that “come out of left field” and which are only heard of long after the fact.
“So, when we put an important matter like the selection of a CEO into the hands of this same Com-mission, Guyanese people would not have the confidence,” said Harmon, the leader of the main opposition APNU+AFC, during a press conference on Tuesday.
He was responding to questions from the Village Voice newspaper which enquired about the opposition’s position to the WPA recommendation regarding GECOM’s shortlisting process of applicants for the CEO position.
Describing the recommendation as an “eminently good one,” Harmon said that citizens prefer an independent body and he added “I believe that our commissioners, who represent the APNU+AFC, have also arrived at that conclusion.”
Though noting that the commission is itself an independent body, Harmon said that the opposition will nonetheless “be looking very carefully at what processes they use and how they arrive at the final set of names…because I can tell you, that some of the names I see there are [a] no-no. They are definitely no-no.”
He said he hopes that the Commission does not allow some of the applicants he has seen to “get pass the first stage of anything.”
He said that the Com-mission ought to be an independent entity “that seeks to find the proper person for that job.”
According to Harmon, while it is an internal determination that has to be made by the Commission, the impact of that outcome “affects all of us here in Guyana. So it can’t just be a lil… in-house business. But we will be paying very close attention to what emerges.”
The two top positions—CEO and Deputy CEO—along with several others, became vacant following the March 2, 2020 general and regional elections where then CEO Keith Lowenfield and DCEO Roxanne Myers faced various accusations of wrongdoing. Their contracts with GECOM were terminated on August 12, 2021, and their posts were subsequently advertised, with the application deadline being October 14.
Opposition Commissioner Vincent Alexander has told the Stabroek News that among the 20 applications for the CEO post is the résumé of former controversial CEO Gocool Boodoo.
Boodoo’s contract was not renewed in 2013.
He had been famously stopped by Alexander in 2011 from making an erroneous declaration which would have given the Donald Ramotar-led PPP/C government 33 seats in parliament when it only had 32. He corrected the intended declaration after he was asked by Alexander to explain how he had arrived at his position. The Ramotar administration won one less seat than APNU and the AFC combined, resulting in a minority government.
Boodoo’s contract was not renewed following a majority vote against rehiring him. Boodoo was later hired by the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development as a consultant and later resigned when the APNU+AFC Coalition took office following its victory at the May 2015 polls.
Alexander said that while the selection process to be employed for a new CEO has not yet been fully finalised, he has proposed that given all of the politics that is going on, “we identify a neutral panel to conduct the interviews instead of the Commissioners and they submit a report to the Commission and we make the decision going forward. But that has not yet been fully ventilated, discussed and decided upon. It is just a suggestion at this time and we are waiting to see what happens.”
Explaining the traditional process used for the appointment of the CEO and DCEO, Alexander said that the criteria are usually decided upon followed by the advertisement of the vacancies. Once applications are in and the deadline passes, the Commission would meet and begin shortlisting applicants.
“We then invite those shortlisted persons to an interview and traditionally the interview is being conducted by the members of the Commission and we all have score sheets on which we score the applicants and tabulate those scores. A report is then compiled and provided to the Commission for the appointment to be decided upon,” he explained.
