Counting 829 votes in the 21st century

Aug 21, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Anyone who believes oil money under Guyana’s political competitors – PPP and APNU+AFC – will usher in a modern Guyana, has to be either mentally challenged, insanely biased or deliberately self-deceiving, after seeing what happened at the PNC Congress on Sunday.
A total of 829 persons cast their votes for different executive positions. The process began on Sunday afternoon. By the stroke of midnight, the results were not known. At the time of writing (Monday morning at 8 a.m.), the results for the executive positions were not yet determined. 829 ballots to choose positions on a party executive cannot be a process longer than half an hour – if that long. The number of 829 is by global standards a very small item.
If you use technology, then computer tabulation would have given you the results perhaps in fifteen minutes. If you get credible people to take out the ballots from the boxes, then have a name-calling process, with others counting, then that process cannot take more than forty minutes. The president of the country who may want to lead Guyana until 2025 had these words to say about the fiasco – “slow and difficult.”
These are the words of the man in charge of the country, and who may want to lead it again after 2020. If his party took almost twelve hours to determine the results of 829 ballots, in all fairness it opens him up to questions about the competence of administering an entire country; not to even mention that this is the 21st century.
President Granger doesn’t strike me as someone who has an embracing emotion about explaining his actions and policies. I doubt whether he would feel he has the obligation to explain to the nation why he described the situation as slow and difficult. I am not a computer expert and have no experience in tabulating votes in any situation, whether in a business entity, a school competition, trade union election etc., but this I know – in the 21st century with both technology and counting hands available, it is virtually impossible to take twelve hours to count the votes of 829 delegates.
I am typing this article and as I go along, I still cannot come to grips with the crude reality that the PNCR took more than twelve hours to determine how 829 persons voted. It is a surreal country we live in. Thousands of bigoted White snobs from the developed world will come from top newspapers and eminent international organizations to Guyana, look at us, run us down wrongfully, as the New York Times’ Clifford Krauss did, but still we do not have the capacity to prove them wrong. It is as if we are genetically incapable of bringing Guyana into the future.
We all should be worried at what happened with that voting process involving 829 persons. This wasn’t a foul-up by some fly-by-night political party. This wasn’t a bottom-house affair by some tiny political entity that knows nothing about holding a party congress. It was an operation conducted by the most powerful people in government.
The leader of the party that held that congressional election is the president of the country. The person who is now second in charge of that party could likely be the president of the republic in four years’ time. These are the people that were part of a machinery in the 21st century where the results of the ballots of 829 delegates took over twelve hours to be ascertained.
What worries me about Guyana’s leaders stretching way, way back since I was young, is their priorities. In my last Sunday column, I mentioned the incident in which a minister came out of his party office to see my dog and looked up the road at a number of reconditioned vehicles on the parapet and yelled out, “I will move them.” That same man is responsible for street lights on the major highways of Guyana and all those highways haven’t got functioning bulbs. I live on the Railway Embankment and from Sheriff Street to Giftland, there is not one bulb.
This gentleman sees it as a priority to move the vehicles of a second hand car business. I doubt whether one percent of Guyana’s population finds that a priority.
So our powerful, pompous leaders took time to make sure David Hinds and Lincoln Lewis are removed as columnists from the Chronicle, but they cannot run an election where a mere 829 persons have to vote. The president said the operation at Congress Place on Sunday afternoon was slow and difficult. What else is slow and difficult in this wasteland named Guyana?

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