A Dangerous Unravelling

Jun 13, 2020 Editorial

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Last night, the de facto President of Guyana, three months after an election that it is now clear he lost by a substantial margin, after hiding from the local press for months except a brief and babysat appearance at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre last month, appeared in an online interview with New York-based radio broadcaster, Mark Benschop.
During the interview, Granger – against increasing international pressure from CARICOM leaders to US members of both the Senate and the lower house of Congress – said that he preferred that foreign heads of government and foreign politicians refrain from commentary on the elections in Guyana. The problem was that Granger was following US Congresswoman, Yvette Clarke, who spent the immediate hour preceding Granger speaking glowingly about his administration – in brief, commenting on the elections in Guyana. The Department of Information of the Granger administration wasted no time in filing a story on Clarke’s appearance (double-billed with Granger on promotion material) on the show in which she is recorded as “Chiding attempts to influence the outcome of the March 2 General and Regional Elections” and maintaining that “members within her caucus are keeping a watchful eye.” Of course, as this paper has covered, Clarke and her friend Hakeem Jeffries, both with ties to the Granger administration, are the sole members of the US Congress that have stood with the Coalition over the past few months with a growing bipartisan list of congresspersons and senators sending clear warnings over the past few weeks to Granger that any attempt to thwart the will of the people would not be tolerated.
As it turns out, Granger’s absurdly contradictory approach to ‘foreign intervention’ and foreign politicians commenting on Guyana’s elections was the least bizarre of the President’s claims during the interview. He, for example, defended his political second in command, Joe Harmon’s intemperate comments ordering current CARICOM Chair Mia Mottley, a Prime Minister, to upbraid Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of another CARICOM country for daring to suggest that the recount be respected. Granger, who has said that he will abide by the recount and by the decision of GECOM, stated that Harmon’s position, which is that GECOM’s decisions and the outcome of the recount are fraudulent, represent his own perspective. Add this to the long history of self-contradiction and doublespeak Granger has subjected this country to over the past several years, most absurd and macabre of which is his mantra “I have always abided by the Constitution” even as there is an on the record Caribbean Court of Justice decision saying that he has not.
As we are exposed to more and more of his plot unraveling, we are also seeing how much David Granger has lost the plot, how far he has in fact drifted from the fundamental reality of what is taking place around him. There can be no clearer example of this drift into what appears to be a boundless ocean of cognitive dissonance than when he claimed during the interview last evening that it was the discoveries of the countless ‘anomalies’, the claims of dead and overseas people voting, and procedural issues with GECOM that led to the national recount. That is a lie, and one that is so easily countered that to utter it, even from what he clearly believes to be the safe zone of a virtual interview from a cloyingly sycophantic host, belies what has to be either an absurd and delusional arrogance or severe cognitive issues – or both.
To be clear, the national recount came out of two main things: commitment made by GECOM Chair, Claudette Singh to Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire in response to legal challenges to the machinations, in Granger’s favour, of Region Four Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo, a name Granger has never once uttered in public; and threats by the international community that they would not accept Mingo’s fictional SOPs, ones that Granger’s party twice said that was in accordance with his Coalition’s. Forced by this pressure, the President on the weekend of March 14 reached out to CARICOM Chair, Barbados Prime Minister, Mia Mottley, to undertake a recount supervised by CARICOM. After prevaricating for two days, with a CARICOM team ready and waiting in the country, it was a Granger Candidate, Ulita Moore, represented by Granger candidate, Roysdale Forde that challenged the legality of the recount, ultimately losing that challenge, but setting the process back by weeks. It was only after then, when the recount began, that the allegations of dead and migrated voters started pouring in. In brief, the unfounded allegations that started during a recount delayed for weeks by a court case seeking to prevent that recount, could not logically be the reason for the recount – yet the man who campaigned under a banner of honesty, integrity and decency made that claim to tens of thousands of people last night.
Recently, former Barbadian Ambassador to the United States, John Beale, was brutal in his assessment of the President, saying that Granger was being referred to in Caribbean political circles as a “sanctimonious gangster”. With his most recent radio appearance, just three days left before GECOM is bound to make a declaration declaring a winner of the 2020 polls, Granger did nothing to argue against that description. The final threads of the increasingly obvious plot to steal the elections are unraveling, but clearly so is its primary author –this is a dangerous development for the country.

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