Decency will be the crucial factor in the election

Feb 01, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There are many statistical equations that one can analyse to show how the opposition can win the 2011 elections. I have already pointed to one of them on this page. Look at the numbers by which the PPP won the last election and see if that figure is not matched by the abstention at the poll by opposition supporters in south Georgetown. It matches.
Get those people who traditionally stay away from the polls to vote and the opposition will have victory.
Leaving that aside, elections are about issues. Even though citizens clamour for change after a particular party has been in power for a long period (as in the case of Owen Arthur in Barbados), people react to issues depending on how they are presented. The combined opposition has a 19-year balance sheet of the PPP to critique.
How they shape their semantics will determine how voters react to them. Any psychologist will tell you that at the fundamental level, human beings are decent people. Humans tend to decry acts of inhuman indecencies. A person may show some discomfort at a candidate who is a womanizer or one who has married five times or someone who once fought on the playing field with an umpire.
However, in the realm of human crudities involving repugnant acts of indecency, humans will show extreme disgust. It is the one area of the game of electioneering that the opposition can secure political capital from the PPP. The tide of bestial politics has been rising in the Government of Guyana since 2001.
Gross indecencies and abominable immoralities have plagued the exercise of power in this land since the 2001 elections. The combined opposition cannot run out of examples because the incidents, cases and situations are countless.
How will the electorate react to the situation in which a male Governmental official was heard on tape soliciting sex from an under-aged boy and not a day of suspension visited him? This very fellow runs a web site using central funds and state resources. That must be the most depraved publication on the internet.
One PPP insider told me Mrs. Jagan had unlimited contempt for this man. A UG lecturer is known to deliver his sexual vocabulary to students on and off the campus yet is elevated to an important state job.
Do law-abiding citizens believe that the little tortured boy just disappeared? Instead of protecting him in a secured location so he could have indicted in a court of law the cruel policemen that burnt his reproductive parts, one suspects that the policemen themselves were protected through certain arrangements that caused the boy and his mother to vanish.
It reminds us of the mother of the under-aged boy and the boy himself mentioned above. Both have disappeared into thin air. Money talks.
Why did the Canadian Refugee Board grant immigration status to a fourteen-year-old West Coast girl who was raped at a business place on the East Bank? The Board felt that given the power of the accused men, the little girl’s life would have been in danger. People are killed on the roadways by reckless drivers of the nouveau riche and police prosecution does not follow because money talks. Indeed money has teeth and tongue and that explained why another bout of forceful sex occurred in Pradoville One. A house lot and plentiful cash helped to shut the mouth of a poor mother.
These are powerful campaign tools that the combined opposition has at their disposal. These are formidable weapons of politics that ought to be used on a campaign trail. Guyana is a morbid land where the exercise of power is marked by dark, cruel, sinister acts of high indecency.
Innocent citizens will not vote for politicians who are made up of such bestial ingredients. The politicians from the opposition must at all times emphasize that even in the most violently run countries, where democracy is nowhere on the agenda, governments discipline their “bad eggs.” It is the right thing to do.
Why would a Prime Minister or President, no matter how autocratic he or she is, remain oblivious to his/her Ministers who molest helpless citizens for sex or beat up whom they want to or pull their guns on those that evoke their annoyance?
These things don’t happen in politics. Only in Guyana. This is a territory where gross misconduct is not even investigated much less carry punishment because one bad egg cannot remonstrate with his fellow bad egg and wouldn’t want to.
It should be an intriguing election campaign.

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Decency will be the crucial factor in the election

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