GIVE PATIENCE A CHANCE!

May 12, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Guyana is a huge country. Guyana is not Georgetown. It comprises human settlements from the highlands to the coastland.
And while 80% of the population resides along the coast, we must appreciate that Guyana’s coastline runs for more than two hundred miles and there are hundreds of villages and settlements along the coastal strip.
One of the problems that is presented every election year is that people tend to judge what happens based on their little neck of the woods. They see a massive turnout in one area and assume that whichever party the majority of the turnout in their area votes for has won the election.
One has to be cautious in this regard because one neck of the woods is not the entire woods. A clump of trees is not a forest. People find strength in numbers, but often their numbers are not as strong as they may feel. What they may assume may not be really so.
Guyanese are awaiting the results of yesterday’s elections. Some people have expectations about victory. But sometimes when one’s expectations are too high and too unrealistic, when it fails to consider that the election is not won by any single community, village or town, then reality can have a devastating effect when that reality sinks in.  And that reality can lead to frustration and cause people to lose reason and control.
It is always wise in situations such as the one that faces Guyana today to be patient. The Guyana Elections Commission has promised results in forty-eight hours. That may be too ambitious given past experience and the need to avoid mistakes, especially where there is a belief that the election is going to be extremely close.
Guyanese have to be patient. There are international observers who are overseeing the process. There are local observers doing the same. The political parties have their personnel also involved.
The staff of GECOM will be under a great deal of pressure and while it is important that they be held to a high standard, it is equally important they be given the latitude and space to complete their work.
Patience is necessary at this time. Any attempt to rush GECOM into making a hasty declaration can backfire on the elections body, because in trying to appease the anxious it may create further problems for itself.
By now, of course, the various political parties would have some idea as to how they performed at yesterday’s polls. Their polling agents would have submitted to their parties’ command centres, the respective statements of poll. The parties would have been tallying up these statements of poll.
In 2006, the PPPC knew long beforehand that it had won the elections, but it could not come out and say so because there is an agreement that the results would only be declared by GECOM. But by and large the main contesting parties would have by now known how they did. But they have to also await the count by GECOM which would be eager to avoid any mistakes.
The problem with the political parties is that they often have organizational problems, and while many of them like to criticize GECOM and protest about the pace of the release of the results, they are no better.
Many times they are unable to efficiently put together all their statements of poll. And thus they have gaps in their tallying.
In 2011, APNU demanded that GECOM supply them with both hard and soft copies of the results. APNU made this demand despite the fact that it should have had polling agents in every polling station and thus in possession of the statements of poll for these stations.  Months after they received the required information from GECOM, APNU was still tallying.
APNU+AFC has now come up with a strange system to allow the coalition to tabulate the results. It has asked its supporters to send images of the results pasted up outside of the polling stations. This is strange request by APNU, because the more logical thing to do is to have its polling agents call in the results. Images can be doctored and sent to APNU giving one result while the true result is different.
One therefore has to exercise patience in the matter of tabulation of the results. And let us be clear: once the ballots have been counted at the polling stations and the statements of poll complied and submitted, the ballot boxes, whose movement people are so suspicious of, really no longer matter. It is the certified and verified statements of poll from which the final declaration is derived.
All those appeals, therefore, for people to safeguard the ballot boxes is nothing but a mobilization tactic. The final count is done from the statements of poll. Instead of fretting, people need to give patience a chance.

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