I don’t have a Facebook account but this was sent to me

May 17, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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It has been pointed out to me by several persons over the past months that there is a Freddie Kissoon Facebook page, the contents of which they respond to. I don’t have such a Facebook account and I am not interested in such a thing. I request that the persons(s) responsible take it down. People who email me from the US, I suggest they inform the Facebook company on my behalf.
From time to time, persons send me interesting statements that people carry on their Facebook pages some of which are unbecoming, given the education and status they possess. Yesterday, I received a part of a Facebook posting from one of Guyana’s prominent academics living right here in Guyana. Here is an extract: “I believe that the unanimity of views expressed by the international actors is not accidental or primarily due to principles but is due to the intense and sustained lobbying by Mercury (the American company) on behalf of the PPP. Mercury supplied the talking points and likely even crafted the messages put out.”
This is the fourth narrative birthed by those who support the flawed 2020 election or deny that the APNU+AFC lost. Before we touch on the so-called superiority, magic, and wonder of Mercury. Let’s briefly describe the other three narratives. The first one is that election battles are a contest between the PNC and PPP and the 2020 contest is no different and there is always rigging in each election by these two parties. This is what the March battle was about. David Hinds and Eusi Kwayana embrace this paradigm openly.
David wrote: “Freddie and others have relied on PPP’s evidence.” Kwayana goes beyond David in this respect. He glaringly takes a side. The least said about Lincoln Lewis in this context the better. This second perspective reduces the 2020 poll to a fight between Indians and Africans for control of Guyana. This is an ugly, dangerous and destructive approach to people’s right to vote.
In this framework, all Indians are painted with a broad brush. Indians who denounce rigged elections are described as people who do not want African-Guyanese to be in government. In a weird, twist of psychotic logic, defenders of the rigged elections are accusing Indians of racism in their denunciation of the tampering by GECOM and the APNU+AFC and in the same breath exonerate themselves from the very accusation of they being racist. In other words, Indians are racist for rejecting an APNU+AFC fraud but Africans are not racist when they support that fraud.
No other example of this is more graphic than David. He wrote: “Freddie’s disenchantment and disappointment with the Coalition has taken him to a certain place. My disenchantment and disappointment with the same coalition has taken me to another place.” You don’t need a philosophy degree to tell you where he puts me and where he puts himself. But it is important to remind people that he was an election candidate for one side in the party/race battle, while I was not.
The third theory is that the white Western governments do not want the PNC in power, have violated Guyana’s sovereignty and have behaved like colonial masters not interested in anything but taking sides for their own self-interest. Just one remark on its asinine nature should suffice. Several Black American congressmen, two former Black Prime Ministers of CARICOM and the CARICOM observer mission itself have not accepted Lowenfield’s declaration.
Now we have the fourth approach as adumbrated by the extract above from the Facebook page of this well-known academic. There was an American consultancy firm, MERCURY employed by the PPP during the campaign. And the sound-bites of this company permeated the minds of the international observers.
As a person who works in the media and meticulously monitored the campaign and had countless discussions with highly placed people in most of the opposition parties except the PPP and with AFC personnel during the campaign, no one ever mentioned the work of MERCURY or its power, magic and influence.
It was after the rigging began and now it is clear that the APNU+AFC lost, the role of MERCURY is being discussed and we are hearing how mesmerizing MERCURY’s influence was that even the international observers were hypnotized. To conclude, all four of these perspectives are insulting to decent humans in Guyana and in the international community who saw with their own eyes how sickening were the levels of rigging that went on. They are also repugnant in that they deny Guyanese the right to vote and have that vote counted. We must assert that right with courage and emotions.

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

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