The end has been reached

Jun 16, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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All the people in the world who followed the election saga in Guyana, except those who belonged to the PNC and AFC and those who wanted their sweet to continue with those two parties in government, knew that the APNU+AFC lost the 2020 poll.
All the people in the world, who followed the saga since Myers, Mingo, Lowenfield and Singh began to dance to the macabre to deny the results, knew the end had to come eventually. There were a number of stratagems used to delay the inevitable. Here the operative word is ‘inevitable” because even if the stratagems were numerous, the APNU+AFC could not remain in office because the most powerful countries in the world, and the most powerful international organizations, would not have allowed the continuation of an APNU+AFC regime beyond a few months.
So what has been happening since Mingo’s evil on March 4 was simply the postponement of the inevitable. APNU+AFC has reached the point of diminishing return or the point of no return. But before we come to how it ended, let us look at some of the strategies after Mingo failed and it became impossible to swear in Granger.
First, delay the recount as long as possible. Lowenfield designated 156 days which made him look asinine in the eyes of the world but Lowenfield, like Claudette Singh, never bothered with how they looked in front of the eyes of the world. When the 156-day pantomime of Lowenfield fizzled out, the court was the next stop. Had the courts prevented the recount, then the plan of Mingo/Lowenfield/ Myers/ Singh would have gone into effect. That is simple to understand. If there was no recount, then GECOM had to accept the declaration of March 14, thus Granger would have been sworn in.
The court direction was derailed because under the Constitution, GECOM cannot be prevented by the courts to pursue a recount. We come now to stratagem number three. Create gargantuan fictions like ghost voting, missing documents, multiple-voting, etc. Then Vincent Alexander and Singh would have taken over and the election deemed inoperable.
All three depravities were designed simply to keep the APNU+AFC in power for a temporary time until sanctions began. The APNU+AFC sugar daddies knew that it was impossible to be legally declared as the winners and they would have to go, but as I suggested in previous columns the attitude, was not to concede and step down but to negotiate with the ABC countries and EU for some form of power-sharing.
It doesn’t look like that can happen after CARICOM’s report. If Singh ignores the CARICOM report and there is no change of government, and APNU+AFC appeals for negotiations while sanction bites, the ABC states and the EU will reject any offer to negotiate. They will demand the exit door.
So the original intention of staying in office in order to generate a power-sharing formula with the approval of CARICOM, OAS, and the powerful western government has failed. If today or by tomorrow Singh dissolves the election results and Granger embraces emergency power, the end will still come within months because the international community will not negotiate power-sharing with Granger.
For those who saw the election nightmare as a priceless opportunity for power-sharing, it will not happen in 2020, and in the remaining months of this year the PPP will be the party in government rallying against any talk of power-sharing because of what the PNC did from March 4. It may eventually happen but not in 2020.
My feeling is that even inclusive governance may not happen before the next election in 2025. The smaller parties are so emotionally traumatized by the Draculian nightmares the APNU+AFC sugar daddies put Guyana through that they may not want to press the PPP administration for inclusive governance in the first two years. And even if they recover from their anger and request the PPP to start a confabulation on reaching out, the PPP will resist arguing that it needs time before it can sit down with politicians who have Norman Bates type of personalities.
What I think the small parties and the PPP will do in 2021 is practice their own kind of inclusive governance. This will involve recognizing the harsh political and ethnic realities thus reaching out to those who do not belong to the PPP but most definitely, that reaching out will not initially be directed to the PNC. I say the PNC and not APNU+AFC. The new government will have to negotiate Guyana’s future with the PNC but I am absolutely sure there is going to the eruption of volcanoes if in the team, the PNC includes people like Moses Nagamootoo and Khemraj Ramjattan.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
[It is important for us to note that the unedited version of the Freddie Kissoon Column titled: ‘Claudette Singh will declare the election improper’ appeared in our Monday June 15, 2020 Edition. The column, which was unintentionally void of a disclaimer, contained some unfounded accusations against GECOM Chair, Ret’d Justice Claudette Singh. For this we extend an unequivocal apology to Justice Singh.]

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