This masquerade

Sep 30, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There is a lovely ‘70s love song, “This Masquerade,” composed by a ‘60s hippie singer, Leon Russell, made famous by Karen Carpenter and for which George Benson won a Grammy. A verse of the song goes like this; “We’re lost inside this lonely game we play.” For a long time now, the nation of Guyana has been living inside a masquerade, lost completely in a lonely game dictated by the savagery of power domination.
The Mayor of Georgetown dropped in last week at the People’s Parliament and handed us a document titled, “The Odyssey and Trial of the Georgetown Mayor and Councilors 1992 -2012.” To understand power domination and its ethnic underpinning, one must avoid putting emphasis on the author of this document. It is not important who wrote it. It could have been a schoolboy. On perusing this document, the reader is exposed to a masquerade that perhaps has no counterpart the world over.
Whether you think Mr. Hamilton Green was a bad politician from the past, whether you think he has not done a good job as mayor is not the point. The document lays bare the complete (not partial) emasculation of an elected body. The citizens of Georgetown went to the polls in 1994 and voted for the Mayor and City Councilors. The ruling party at the centre obtained eight seats out of thirty. Yet from 1994, this elected authority of the Georgetown municipality has had its jurisdiction overridden by a party in the central government that has ignored the rules and power that flow from a free election.
If the Constitution or the laws of Guyana allow for the central government to bypass the Georgetown City Council, then the 1994 election was a farce, and any future local authority poll will be such if the laws are not amended.
This masquerade takes on a ghoulish dimension when two realities are factored into the equation. One is that the very central government since 1992 has had its votes from selected constituencies and not proportionately across the territory of Guyana. It means then that morally, politically and electorally, central government should not display power arrogance, because its mandate is not a popular one.
The second reality is that the Georgetown Municipality is a part of Region 4 and since 1992, the ruling PPP has not won a majority of the votes on the lower part of the ballot paper when it comes to Region 4. The graphic reality then is that since the nineties began, the PPP has been a terrible loser in elections in Georgetown and Region 4. Yet since 1992, the ruling PPP has wielded enormous power over the Georgetown Municipality and Region 4 administration.
Earlier this year, the Chairman of Region 4, Mr. Clement Corlette sat at his desk in his office and said to me across the table, “Freddie, they cut the Region 4 budget by seventy-two percent.” He was referring to the budget that his administration handed the Finance Minister when the national budget was being prepared. Shortly after the general elections in November last year, the central government began redeploying Region 4 overseers to different Regions across Guyana.
What then is the purpose of the second vote on our ballot paper? On Friday, I was part of a delegation from the People’s Parliament that made representation to the Lusignan NDC over complete lack of toilet facilities for the large vendor community at the Friday Lusignan market.
At the NDC office we were told that the NDC Councilors have been removed and an IMC has been installed. Lusignan is in Region 4, yet I was informed that the chairman of Region 4, elected in a free and open poll last November, was not even informed about the IMC at Lusignan.
Here is where the PNC and now APNU have failed Guyana badly. But that is in the past. We now have the phenomenal results of the last general elections. There is now the AFC. Both parties have a moral and political obligation to go to the people of Guyana, the Caribbean Governments and the ABC Governments, and declare that they will not accept central authority’s complete jurisdiction over the affairs of Region 4, because it is a depraved rejection of the fundamental value of free and fair elections.
Why are elected politicians in the Georgetown Municipality and Region 4 not allowed to govern? This masquerade has now entered the realm of the bizarre and the macabre. The domination of the Georgetown Municipality and Region 4 continues in 2012 when in 2011, the ruling PPP lost a majority in the national elections. Who will stop this masquerade?

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