Political pimping and electoral prostitution

Apr 14, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

A devious political game is being played by Dr. David Hinds. While his party, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), supported the call for a total recount of the votes cast at the 2020 General and Regional Elections, Dr. Hinds (no doubt, he will say in his personal capacity) is now calling for an abandonment of the elections and for the establishment of an interim government.
In so doing, he is appropriating to himself the right to decide the fate of the nation. He has arrogated to himself the wisdom of an Oracle now that he knows that his Coalition has lost, comprehensively, the elections.
Having rejected the will of the people, he now wants to dictate how they should be ruled. This is not democracy; it is demagoguery.
His position is tantamount to one in which once the Coalition does not win an election, then democracy cannot be the answer to the country’s problems. In this scheme, elections are only relevant if they result in a victory for the Coalition.
By casting doubts on the value of elections, he is undermining his claim as a supporter of free and fair elections. He says he supports free and fair elections, yet he does not respect their outcome. In other words, elections only matter if they are to his advantage.
Hinds’ party, the WPA, has long touted the need for a political solution. It however had excluded the PNC from involvement in its proposed National Government of Unity and Reconstruction in 1979. Hinds now wants to exclude elections from that solution.
Hinds has selective amnesia. His party was part of the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy which was established to fight for the restoration of free and fair elections. The WPA’s position has always been that free and fair elections were integral to a political solution, a position which Hinds appears now to be rejecting.
How does he expect one-half of the population to feel when having won an election, they find themselves unable to govern. Does he see this as providing any comfort for that segment of the population to support his idea of a ‘political solution’?
How can he be said to truly support free and fair elections when he wants the election results to be abandoned. So what was the purpose of the elections in which he participated as a candidate?
If he truly supported free and fair elections, he has an opportunity to admit that what took place with the tabulation of the votes for District 4 constitutes a travesty – similar to the type of rigging which his party railed against under both Burnham and Hoyte.
Instead of doing this, he dishonestly dodges the issue of electoral malpractice by claiming that the narrative of rigging is being used to support one-party domination. But that shoe also fits both feet, does it not?
What if the Coalition had won the 2020 elections? Would Hinds have called for the ballot boxes to be discarded and an interim government established? Why have an election which only matters if the Coalition wins?
David Hinds did not advocate for an interim government after the 2015 elections which the Coalition won by a razor-slim majority. He has an explanation for this failure on his part. His explanation is that he did not press for an interim government because the government, of which his party was a part, was not dictatorial.
This is both surprising and sickening coming from a man who consistently complained that his party was sidelined within the Coalition. Hinds was quoted as saying that some of the parties in the Coalition were simply left out of the decision-making process and that everything was centrally controlled by a select group. He noted that for all of 2018, there was just a single meeting of APNU, and in three and a half years, the WPA – one of the parties in the Coalition – was never invited to a meeting with the AFC.
Hinds is on record as calling on the government to apologize to the nation, before he himself was kicked out of the op-ed pages of the Guyana Chronicle for criticizing the same non-dictatorial government which did everything possible to subvert the no-confidence motion and to frustrate a consensual approach to appointing a Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission.
The way he and his party were used as doormats by the PNCR is enough reason for him to classify the APNU+AFC as ‘dictatorial’ in the loose manner in which he uses the term. But he does not.
One has to ask whether he is comfortable with his party becoming the political pimp of the ruling regime. Perhaps it is waiting on its commission for being an advocate of electoral prostitution!

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)