The silly season is returning

Jul 10, 2011 Features / Columnists, My Column

---

By Adam Harris

On Friday, President Bharrat Jagdeo continued to put to rest any idea that he would be seeking a third term. But what was interesting was that he got numerous lucrative offers and he has turned down all so far. One such offer was the post of CARICOM Secretary-General.
This post should never have been offered to a Guyanese. When the institution was set up, the founding fathers made a number of deals. Guyana bargained for the headquarters with the caveat that no Guyanese would accede to the post of Secretary-General. It must be that the current crop of regional leaders sees in President Jagdeo a talent that the region needs, hence the break with tradition.
However, the base issue is the election due this year. And as usual there is the flurry of activities, the charges and the counter-charges and of course, the attacks against each of the major political parties for indiscretions of one sort or another.
The current talking point is the voters’ list, and this always bothers me every time the elections come around. Guyana has a population of less than a million people. The number of eligible voters is somewhere about 450,000. The reality at elections is that no more than sixty per cent of these would cast their ballot.
I keep asking myself, how long it would take to write down 450,000 names and addresses. I then ask myself why is it that it would take five years to verify that these people are who they say they are, and that they live where they say they do.
Further, I wonder about the amount of money spent to verify these facts and about the reason for discarding the verification that went before to do the same thing all over again.
In 2001, there was confusion over the list to the extent that the matter went to court, and a judge ruled that it was unlawful to demand that a voter possess an identification card to cast his or her ballot. To correct this, the government spent a few hundred millions of dollars to conduct house-to-house registration to prepare a new list of voters.
In the process, it passed legislation that gave legality to the use of the identification card during elections. But even here people found that they could get more than one identification card using different names. The Guyana Elections Commission, ever since 2001, had said that it had a failsafe method to ensure that the multiple registration was not going to pass through. It either lied or found that its method was not failsafe.
So a country with such a small population had to repeat the registration process. By this time, equipment was more sophisticated, but from the look of the identification cards no one would have believed this. The images could have been anyone, but the people who assembled the cards did not worry too much. I heard the complaints and I found out that more money had to be put in place to correct the images on the cards.
What I find annoying even, is the fact that the money we spend to prepare for elections could go a long way to help some poor people, who in any case refuse to pay attention to the elections these days. They are more concerned with putting food on the table.
I cannot think about any country, even those with much larger populations, having problems preparing a list of voters. The United States, with a population more than three hundred times Guyana’s, knows when elections are to be held, and never once were these elections postponed because of the list of voters.
The small islands in our corner of the world call snap elections and they have no problems. Certainly, Guyana which at one time called snap elections cannot do the same now. And this is because we simply cannot keep a tally of people, most of whom live here all the time.
Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission, Dr Steve Surujbally, actually said to me that this time around he is going to ensure that never again will there be problems with the voters’ list. It looks like he is in for a rude awakening. We are finding that many people do not have a document as simple as a birth certificate.
I would have expected that in this day and age every birth would have been registered. I now find out that people who have the old document, issued decades ago, have a problem securing a replacement. Many of these failed to do so for the elections.
At the rate I see people lining up for passports, I would expect that there are enough birth certificates. For the elections, though, this is not the case.
The result is that there are about 40,000 people who are ineligible to vote, simply because they do not have birth certificates to facilitate the tally of people who are old enough to vote.
It must be that we Guyanese like to make everything difficult. It started back in 1992, when the elections commission had the names of people but somehow prepared real and bogus voters’ lists that disenfranchised people, either deliberately or because of sheer incompetence.
I suppose the confusion never went away. I am now left to wonder if our poor performance at Mathematics at the school level is being manifested at this level. But I still hope that this would be resolved. I do know that there are many people who do not care, because they got registered but are refusing to uplift the identification cards.
How else can one explain the fact that nearly 40,000 identification cards are left in the custody of the commission? This, coupled with the people who have not been registered, points to a low poll whenever the elections are held. We are in for interesting times.

---

---