Bonfires of the inanities

Jan 06, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Two political morbidities stood out in 2011. If Jimmy Carter was here, he would have asked the question; “Hasn’t this society dumped these things on the rubbish heap and made a huge bonfire of them long ago? Carter has long washed his hand of Guyana. One got the distinct impression that the Carter Centre believed that Guyana was too intractable a polity to warrant the expenditure of its time and resources.
Guyana remains a backward place with anachronistic processes that long should have been dumped into the bonfires. The most glaring of these inanities is the Carter Centre- drafted Guyana Elections Commission. It came into being at the beginning of the nineties and was supposed to be a makeshift formula. For five successive elections, this country has had to live with this institution whose composition is not replicated elsewhere in the world.
The year 2011 should mark the final existence of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) as we know it since 1992. At the time of writing, there is the accusation swirling around GECOM about the nearness of it announcing a wrong election declaration.
Shortly after the November 28 poll, I penned a column in which I stated that one of the Commissioners told me that it was only on his intervention a declaration was not made because his calculations and Mr. Boodoo’s were not in sync. I asked him to give me permission to name him. He refused. He is still refusing. But history is intact because we have the minutes of that particular GECOM meeting.
The absurdity of having an election organization that is legally responsible for conducting elections and its policy-making machinery is exclusively staffed by nominations from political parties should have been on the rubbish heap a long time ago. It is not professional, it is too politicized, it is too unaccountable to the nation’s stakeholders and its chairman is too legally insulated.
Last year will go down in history because it showed how outdated GECOM has become. Let us assume that what is currently in the press is right, then suppose the Chief Elections Officer (CEO) had said that his tabulation was correct and that he was not changing it, and he wanted it to go to the vote.
Two nasty situations could have occurred. The Chairman, knowing that the CEO’s figure was wrong but wanting to see a certain party get into power, could have used his casting vote and there was absolutely nothing the three opposition commissioners could have done.
And the only recourse for the opposition was to file an election writ and wait fifty years for it to come to light. Secondly, at the time of the voting, one of the opposition commissioners could have taken ill. The fate of GECOM is sealed. This country has to modernize it and must do so before local government elections
The second inanity that must be put into the bonfire is the state control of the media. Everyone knows that Zimbabwe is a dictatorship but Rupert Roopnaraine said in a television interview that domination of the state media is Guyana is more egregious than Zimbabwe. That is a frightening statement to digest. The use of the state media in last year’s general elections was extremely evil.
It wasn’t a saturation. It was an abomination. It was an over-kill. It was far worse than any of those assessments. For me, the description was evil. Since the campaign officially began, NCN television, NCN radio and the Chronicle featured the PPP campaign as the lead item right up to polling day when NCN radio was extolling the results of a fictional poll done by an organization no one can locate in the world– NACTA.
It is good that this pathology of the PPP was manifested. The young people in this land can now make the comparison between the PNC Government and the PPP regime. They grew up hearing how bad the PNC was. Well, they can see how evil is the PPP for themselves.
The third inanity that must be thrown into the furnace is our outdated campaign laws pertaining to finance. Jamaica is the latest country to regulate campaign financing. Khemraj Ramjattan told Yesu Persaud on television that the exercise cost the AFC some $80M. Well think of how much the PPP spent. It has to be ten times more than the AFC.
I don’t have the figures but was told it was $740M. There can be no doubt the PPP spent hundreds of millions. The most colossal inanity of 2011 is that with all those resources, the PPP couldn’t get even a majority in Parliament.

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Bonfires of the inanities

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