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Fascists should not win national elections

May 13, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

This column was penned at 18.45 hours Tuesday afternoon without the official results of the 2015 general elections. At that time, there were published statistics from the APNU-AFC coalition and the PPP that put each of them ahead of the other. In the PPP’s release, it is ahead by 30,000.
The coalition announced it is ahead by 25, 000. By the time the day wears on, we should have the official results from GECOM.  The arguments in this essay are based on discussion with coalition leaders who have assured me that the coalition has won the elections.
I have not lived in many countries and studied the politics of those states, but I think one has to look hard in global politics to find another ruling party that at the psychological level believed that the country was their personal possession. This was me where the PPP alienated the majority in the citizenry of Guyana.
Whether it was a public school building, the Bank of Guyana, the University of Guyana, the public parapet, the traffic lights, the roadways, etc, the manner in which the PPP leaders addressed the public domain was as if it was their personal property. We can cite just two egregious examples. One was when a Minister moved into a street in Queenstown and immediately made it a one-way. I spoke to the then traffic chief about the reason. He said it was not a decision by the police but the Ministry of Public Works.
Secondly, this country has four large public swimming pools and not one is open to the public in the general sense, meaning a member of the public on a walk-in basis can use one of them. I haven’t done the research but I doubt this obtains anywhere else in the world. One may understand restrictions at the country’s only pool. But it is unbelievably unjust for a country to have four of them, yet not even one is available to the Guyanese people on a first come basis.
Guyanese people, in general, resented the way this possessive mentality was demonstrated. People felt that their country was the private property of a cabal. What made it worse, was that after 2011, the PPP became a minority government but there was no dilution in the function of the possessive mentality.
Perhaps the greatest fear people had of the PPP (just to remind readers, this column is based on assumptions on the outcome of the just concluded elections) is that, if it could have behaved in old ways as a minority government, then the PPP would be more insensitive and cruel if it got a majority in 2015.
Assuming that the PPP lost the election, then the question of the nature of its governance comes in. I have written thousands of columns on Guyanese politics and in those pieces I have repeatedly compared the nature of power under Burnham’s PPP and Jagdeo’s PPP and concluded that Mr. Jagdeo was more dictatorial.
I repeat here; I honestly believe the Burnham Government was authoritarian but I will put my academic studies on the line by saying that if you make a comparison between the two presidents, Mr. Burnham is ahead of him in all areas of governance.
To analyze in a column where the PPP went wrong would be an injustice to readers. That topic will not fill even one volume of a book. But to be brief, I think you have to look hard in the world to find a ruling cabal that was so obsessed with winning even the inconsequential battles with the opposition, with confronting even the most harmless critic of its rule than the PPP.
Something took over the entire PPP leadership that maybe has no explanation. If the official results from GECOM show the PPP has lost, I will expand on this analysis because I think everyone in the world that knows Guyanese and Guyana would want an attempted answer to that question.
Finally, as written at the beginning of this column, I penned these thoughts near to 7 PM, one day after the polls closed. Yet we do not have the official results. In a country where about half of a million votes were counted in an age of mind-boggling technology.
And this has been going on for years and years. When is Guyana going to join the modern world?
GECOM keeps saying after each election that it will do it better the next time. But when the next time comes around, it was just like the last time. Someone has to help this country.

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