GECOM, not the Govt., should be setting elections date to ensure a leveled playing field for all contesting parties

Mar 21, 2010 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Permit me to proverbially kill two birds with one stone here. In a letter from Chairman of GECOM, Dr. Steve Surujbally, “Politicians should stop making uninformed comments about GECOM and its work,” (Kaieteur News, March 18), he answered my question in a letter published the same day in your newspaper, “If GECOM is responsible for conducting elections, why is the Minister setting the date?”
This is what he wrote in point number 6 of his letter, “GECOM has not to date made, nor is it authorised to make any official statement pertaining to the appointment of any date for the holding of Local Government Elections. GECOM has the responsibility to inform the Minister of Local Government about the Commission’s state of preparedness and about a date on which Local Government Elections could be held.”
Even though I appreciate being enlightened here, what I would have preferred was the citing of a clause from the Local Government Act that supports the Chairman’s contention that the Minister of Local Government and not GECOM is authorised to set the date.
Because the logical interpretation of what the Minister wrote in his letter about the LG Act being amended to pass all responsibilities for the elections from the Minister to GECOM is that the Minister is no longer directly responsible for any aspect of the preparation and staging of elections.
While I wait to see if the GECOM Chairman will provide us with the clause in the LG Act that says the Minister must set the elections date, his clarification on the issue now raises another pertinent question: what if GECOM informs the Minister it is ready for elections and suggests a date, can the Minister delay the date for elections?
Even if there is another clause in the LG Act that can answer that, it is cold comfort to voters that the date setting for elections is left to the Minister, because if his government can fail for the last 15 years to hold constitutionally mandated LG Elections, then it is capable of delaying elections under whatever guise it wants to use. It can just as well bull-rush the staging of the elections if it is ready and other parties are not.
To me, the LG Act should provide a level playing field so that only GECOM is responsible for preparing elections and setting elections date, because it is unfair to the other contesting parties that the government which has a dog in this fight – the PPP – is solely responsible for setting a date for elections. Selah! It can delay the date until it is comfortable that the PPP is ready!
I know some die-hard supporters of the PPP and its government might want to jump in and say GECOM reportedly suggested LG Elections be held next month and the Minister seems ready to concur, thus nullifying my foregoing observation, but if this government really supports democracy, as it often boasts, how can an announcement for elections be made with only one month’s notice?
This is not snap elections. One month is not enough time for parties and candidates to fine tune their preparation and presentation so voters in contesting municipalities can make a studied choice.
Meanwhile, what does it say about GECOM and the government appearing to be in cahoots on the date for staging of LG Elections, while two of the parliamentary opposition parties – the PNC and AFC – have expressed grave reservations about the exercise without the necessary legislative reforms taking effect first?
The second bird to be stoned relates to Dr. Cheddi ‘Joey’ Jagan’s letter, “Cheddi Jagan was a Marxist and a realist,” (Kaieteur News, March 18).
I have no idea why he felt the need to say this, because the point he was supposed to respond to in my last letter that mentioned him, was whether his father and mother’s own communist orientation as leaders of the PPP was responsible for what he described as the communist oriented elite now running the PPP in contravention of his father’s vision.
Saying his father saw himself in the image of Mikhail Gorbachev, a Soviet Union political reformer cannot exculpate his father for what is happening in the PPP today.
And that’s the gist of my point; not whether his father was a Marxist or realist.
What is also rather revealing about his continued defiant defence of his father is that he never refers to the PPP as belonging to his father and mother, it is always belonged to his father, even though his mother played a major behind the scenes role in the party before 1992 and after taking full control of it when her husband died in 1997.
Dr. Joey also continues to steer away from naming the so-called ‘Gang of Eight’ who hijacked his ‘father’s party’, making me now wonder if his mother was part of the gang, because after 1997, she took literally control of the party and government until President Bharrat Jagdeo began running the government his way.
Mr. Editor, the lone reason I keep exchanging letters with Dr. Joey is because I believe he knows what happened to the PPP after his father died, and I keep hoping he would one day tell the nation what he knows went wrong in the PPP that resulted in the current state of affairs in government and the country.
To him it may be that his father’s vision before he died was for shared governance, but to the nation, it is all about the lack of a viable economic vision to take us beyond foreign loans and grants, remittances and an informal economy that is 60% of the formal economy.
Whether we see the PPP through his lens or the people’s lenses, one thing is sure: the PPP has failed, and so it is time for Dr. Joey to realise the PPP today is not his father’s any more, and for the people realise that the country can do better than this.
On Dr. Joey’s continued obsessive compulsive hatred of the Alliance For Change – a party that has been around for less than five years compared to the PPP and PNC, which have together have more than 100 years – I am firmly of the opinion that even a simple response to his vitriolic diatribe could prove intellectually challenging to his comprehensive capacity.
For the record, though, I did include the AFC in the mix with the PPP and PNC in my agreement with him to stop limiting the presidential selection process in parties to a select few and to start including ordinary party members, so that his reference to the AFC’s selection of Mr. Khemraj Ramjattan as its 2011 presidential candidate had nothing to do with the absence of a democratic process in the AFC, but everything to do with his continued rage at the AFC, which he sees as a stumbling block to his calls for shared governance.
And continuing in his blinding rage, he ventured misguidedly to prove the AFC is not living up to the definitions of the words in its name by adverting to dictionary definitions to show that ‘alliance’ means “union or agreement to cooperate” or “coalition” or “the parties involved”, or that ‘change’ means “substitution of one thing for another” or “switch” or “making or becoming different” or “alteration or modification.” Simple minds produce simple musings.
Two quick closing thoughts on his quirky ranting here: First, from my political vantage point, the AFC’s rotating presidential system was agreed upon when the party was launched in 2005.
Mr. Raphael Trotman was the party’s candidate in 2006 and Mr. Ramjattan’s turn is due in 2011.
It is not a perfect arrangement, but until a better system evolves that allows members to have a democratic say in selecting their presidential candidate, it can be used in the interim to build trust so neither man can put his ego ahead of the party’s vision and mandate for change, through seeking allies from the political arena and civil society who are sick and tired of the ethnic-based politics of the PPP and PNC and want to effect positive change in the way politics is conducted in Guyana, in the way myriad races interact, in the way government – executive, legislative and judicial branches – is run, and in the way our country goes forward with a viable economic vision.
Second, if the AFC were to align itself with the PPP and PNC in any shared governance deal before elections, as Dr. Joey misguidedly suggests, it will lose its right to be called an agent of political change.
Dr. Joey knows that the two principal founders of the AFC were once members of the PPP and PNC and had advocated reforms in their parties, but were rebuffed, so where is the logic in taking the AFC into a political camp at this juncture with the still unreformed PPP and PNC?
If – and that’s a big if – the AFC is amenable to shared governance, it has to either win the national elections and then make an offer on this or at least gain sufficient votes at national elections to increase its parliamentary seats and then, as a deal maker, use the additional parliamentary seats as negotiating leverage.
And those are just my views, not the AFC’s, so Dr. Joey need not intemperately bash the AFC through me.
Emile Mervin

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