People are not fooled

Jul 19, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Two women were having a vociferous argument. One of the women was having the better of the other. And the other person realized this. But she did not want to lose face so what she did was keep countering everything that the first woman was saying.
At times, she went to absurd lengths. She did not want to lose the argument so after a while she resorted to developing woefully fictitious narratives about the other woman.
What is playing out today in Guyana is a clash of two narratives. The peddler of one of those narratives is dealing with a concoction. They have lost the argument but are now dealing with verbal subterfuge in order to justify the stance that they have taken in not conceding that the other side has emerged victorious in the elections.
No one side or person likes to lose a Guyanese argument. And no side admits it has lost. Long after the argument is concluded, the loser continues with the verbal sparring.
It is not that the person who has lost does not know that he or she been defeated. It is just a case of not conceding even though the loser knows the truth.
The supporters of the APNU+AFC have not been deceived into believing that the Coalition either won or was cheated out of the elections. The APNU+AFC has not succeeded in convincing its supporters, to any substantive degree, that there was fraud in the March 2, 2020 elections.
The supporters of the APNU+AFC who are peddling the now woefully discredited narrative about fraud, seem to have overlooked the fact that the Coalition is claiming victory based on the same fraud. If there was substantive fraud – defined as fraud to a degree that would affect the overall result – then how can the Coalition be claiming victory.
The Coalition supporters are not fooled. They know the truth. They know that the partnership lost the elections and lost it fairly and squarely. Trying to argue with them is like trying to convince them of what they already know. It is a wasted exercise.
The Coalition supporters know what happened, but they want their political grouping to emerge victorious. And not having won the election to do so, they feel they have an obligation to say that they won or to claim that the PPP/C cheated.
The APNU+AFC first claimed that it had won the elections. It never produced its Statements of Polls (SOPs). The President of Guyana is reported as saying that he never saw his Coalition’s Statements of Polls; he saw spreadsheet of the results.
He could have saved this country billions of dollars, four months and a great deal of embarrassment, if he had simply asked his party for copies of the Statements of Polls and had one of his trusted colleagues verify whether the results declared by Mingo matched those on his Coalition’s Statements of Polls.
There would have been no need for a recount, no need for the legal challenge to the recount, no need for any litigation to disregard the recount. All it would have taken was for the President to simply ask for the Statements of Polls.
But no one is too fooled into simply believing that this was an oversight by the President. If it were an oversight, it is not too late for him to ask for the SOPs. And to use these to verify whether the numbers declared by Mingo, which gave the APNU+AFC a victory, were accurate. But we know that he knows better.
Equally, the allegation about dead and migrated persons voting is a fiction. The system at the polling station is of such as to make this next to impossible. As for the alleged 81 death certificates which were said to be produced for those who voted, it needs to be explained how the person or persons who produced those death certificates got them in the first place. And who confirmed that 81 dead persons voted? And who verified they were dead. There were persons who the Coalition alleged were out of the jurisdiction. But these persons kept turning up in droves. It was all a concoction and the supporters of the APNU+AFC know this. But this is all they have, to keep the argument about the elections going.
As one Caribbean Prime Minister said, when they first came here to mediate the election dispute, there was not a single complaint about any irregularity. As Timothy Jonas said, if the PPP/C was able to pull off a fraud in which 80,000 fraudulent votes were cast, then the PPP/C has to be real good because that is about one in just over five voters.
People know the truth. They are not easily fooled. But they have a cause and they have to have a reason to be pursuing that cause, even if it is fictitious as the contention that reason why the Americans are critical of election rigging in Guyana is because of the denial of rights to relay Voice of America radio signals from Guyana to Venezuela.
For the record America’s strongest ally in the Region is Colombia which is next door to Venezuela and where the Americans can easily establish a relay station.

(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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