Settling Doubts

Feb 17, 2012 Editorial

Just when it appeared that the political parties had been settling down into their roles under the ‘new’ dispensation, a firestorm has erupted. The spark was provided by the President’s charge that the opposition had resorted to ‘a very strong racial line in their campaign’ during the last elections. More substantively, he went on to assert that the elections themselves were, for all intents and purposes, ‘rigged’ by the opposition.
President Ramotar illustrated his first charge by citing the instance of the voting at Linden: “We had a seat in Linden the last term… (but this time)… We received 17% of the votes, which is still very good, but I cannot deny that the racial line on which they campaigned did have an impact. It is their normal strategy; and this time it was worse because they pushed the racial line in a very hard way.”
Mr David Granger of APNU was apoplectic. He claimed that the President was accusing his party of practicing ‘racism’, which he denied vehemently. His party, he emphasised, was taking these ‘most serious charges’ very seriously, since they meant APNU had engaged in illegal and criminal acts. It is our considered view that the charge of a ‘racial line’ in campaigning, which was interpreted as practicing ‘racism’, is bemoaning a form of political mobilisation in our country that in unfortunately now endemic. All the parties need to get off this bandwagon since ‘all are involved’ and all Guyana is being consumed by its effects.
The other charge, however, – about electoral rigging – is a horse of a completely different colour. Even while the vote was being counted there were accusations from both the incumbent PPP and the opposition parties of improper activities. The President identified two areas where he felt these activities had led to ‘manipulation (of the votes) by the opposition.’ Firstly there were allegations of removing PPP agents to prevent them from observing the count: “They (the opposition) did a lot of wicked things in South Georgetown and some other areas, where they created an atmosphere not to have any PPP/C polling agents around; and they managed to get them out by terrible hostility and threatening violence and so on.”
Secondly and more seriously, the President spoke of subversion of GECOM – the institution vouchsafing the entire process. “They (the opposition) penetrated GECOM and controlled (to some extent) the election machinery, where they were not even taking instructions from the Chairman or the Chief Elections Officer; and they were doing a lot of manipulation at that point in time.”
Then came the denouement: “Even with the counting, I understand that they kept people far away, so that they could not see what was happening. That was confirmed to me by independent observers…I think that there was some level of manipulation on the part of the opposition.” Now while the opposition has denied these charges, APNU itself had earlier made serious allegations about the validity of the announced results of the elections.
They had requested copies of the Statements of Poll since they claimed the results from their copies did not match those from GECOM. The smallest party, the AFC has consistently accepted the results as ‘fair”. The President revealed that his party had abandoned their legal recourse to several recounts during the elections because they did not want to precipitate ‘violence”. Obviously, he now feels that cooler heads will prevail.
From the reaction of the opposition, we are not so sure and we believe that with the delicately poised political equilibrium, we need greater confidence in the legitimacy of those in charge of our national affairs. It was revealed that the President had raised the possibility of a ‘forensic audit’ early in the day during the “Tripartite” meetings. While the AFC has rejected this option, it appears that APNU does not rule it out.
Doubts have been raised as to the exact modalities that might deliver this way forward but we feel that it should be pursued.

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Settling Doubts

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