EU Observer Report: GECOM

Jun 08, 2020 Editorial

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The EU Observer Report in 64 sweeping pages travels the sorry, sordid picture of the unholy mess that is Guyana. It was mostly there: from ethnic polarization to ethnic-focused voting, from GECOM’s blatant failures at the leadership and management levels to significant media bias, from the cascade and influence of dark campaign financing money to the urgent need for comprehensive electoral reform from almost every angle conceivable. It was all there, this snapshot of a study of Guyana and its ghastly national viruses, its unbending ways, and its need to do the substantial now and then build upon those reinvigorating essences.
That was how we read it and how we interpreted it, what we gathered from it, as to what we need to do to give ourselves the chance to avoid the quagmires and impasses that have crippled us for the past eighteen months, if not forever. As another indication of how bad things are here, this briefest of studies and accompanying reports was not a sociological or economic study, but of an elections process only, yet there was a total of 26 recommendations from something as limited as this.
Where to start in saying something by lending a voice? Embedded in those 26 recommendations were what was termed eight priority ones, as in requiring immediate attention. We start with GECOM only today, with more to follow in due course.
As regards GECOM, what could be said about what the EU’s observer team noted about it? We will try to be helping as we seek to contribute to the healing that is so vitally necessary for this society at present.
First, the report pointed out that “GECOM abdicated its constitutional duty to take all actions necessary to ensure compliance with the law.” In other words, senior leadership compromised itself, and that starts and ends with the chairperson, who now stands stained and tattered through internationally observed dereliction of duty. As much as we sympathize with retired Justice Claudette Singh, it is on her that rests the ultimate blame and responsibility in the unnamed references in the EU’s report. For at the end of the day, the head takes the fall. Certainly, the management team and the most senior levels should be not be spared mention, as even the most charitable reading of the report questions integrity and devotion to the requirements of the law of the land. This was neither followed nor recognized on a consistent basis and was totally trampled upon when the more sensitive and crucial calls had to be made. These were not forthcoming from either the chair or upper management.
To repeat: The chairwoman failed miserably, and we regret having to say this. And so, too, did the visible senior management of the Commission, who sought to perpetuate several obvious frauds on a divided and incited Guyanese electorate. This was and remains dangerous. To have failed so abjectly to display leadership and will for the nonpartisan and the national beggars the mind, and betrays the accumulated constitutional trusts placed on the leadership of GECOM when those mattered the most.
Second, Recommendation 2 calls for a comprehensive “overhaul” of GECOM in relation to its “composition and functioning,” We agree wholeheartedly and call upon our fellow Guyanese to join with us in picking up the cudgels and demand a new and different GECOM, one that is committed to serving, first and above all, not rank political objectives, but the interests of country and citizens. Nothing else will do; anything else will fail and leave us in the same dark, ugly racial place in which we have been trapped for so long, and which was highlighted as never before from March 2nd to now.
For GECOM as it is currently constituted cannot function, is handicapped in delivering. which as all Guyanese know is an arrangement and apparatus dedicated to what frustrates, perpetuates racial distrusts and incitements, and leads to the routine and blatant failures that plagued the agency since March 2, if not before. For starters, a different look, a wider cross-section, depoliticization (more civic-oriented), and unambiguous roles, procedures, and practices fully described. It is why we say what the EU is constrained by the protocols of temperate official reporting from saying: Discard the existing mechanism, dismiss the leadership personnel, and start from scratch with new laws, new policies, and a thoroughly new composition with new people more reflective of Guyana.
In sum, this whole business of GECOM needs to be declared a testimony to national bankruptcy. This is what we say: scrap this abomination of an entity, as it is currently constituted. Start over from scratch with a clean canvas and a new paintbrush. It has to be one that is inclusive and diverse in the richness of this endowed land. It must be of the widest cross-section of the clean, conscientious, and incorruptible. We should be able to find a few. And a few is all that it takes to start somewhere new, somewhere better.
We have much backbreaking work to do in this country, GECOM and the media are only part of the hard challenges. But we must not shrink. We must tell ourselves confidently that we have what it takes to make this Guyana of ours a better place. If nothing else, let that be the lesson from Elections 2020.

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