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Guyana already in a dictatorship – Paul Tennassee
Former Guyanese politician, Paul Nehru Tennassee said that Guyana is already in a dictatorship, and that if President David Granger refuses to accept a declaration of the results of the national vote recount, he will have consolidated that dictatorship.
Professor and former Guyanese politician, Paul Nehru Tennassee
Tennassee addressed the public on Kaieteur Radio’s Room 592 on Saturday evening. He had headed the Democratic Labour Movement (DLM), a political party which existed in the 1980s and contested the 1985 elections in the fight for free and fair elections. He is now a director at The Roraima Institute (TRI), a non-partisan research and policy institute, and a professor at the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, DC USA. There, he teaches in Government and Political Corruption, among other things.
Explaining how he arrived at his view, Tennassee said, “Constitutionally, since March of last year, we were supposed to have an election based on the no confidence motion and so. So from April last year to the elections of March this year, if you do not have a sitting parliament, what do you have in a country? You have a dictatorship. You have a dictator.”
Tennassee pointed to the importance of Parliament as a representation of the people’s sovereignty.
“The people are sovereign but the people delegate that sovereignty to the parliament that they elect,” he said, “There is no parliament. So we have had a dictatorship from then to now.”
He noted that there is talk of calling a state of emergency in Guyana, and stated implicitly that the function of such would be to consolidate said dictatorship.
Incumbent President David Granger
The election situation, he indicated, is not in tension with his view of the system.
The Granger coalition has lost the election, but it refuses to accept its loss and has been claiming that its leaders think the coalition won.
“We maintain,” the party said in a statement last week, “that the Elections Commission can only make a ‘declaration’ based on valid votes. The recount process which was conducted, painstakingly, for thirty-three days revealed massive irregularities and extensive fraud which cannot be foisted on the Guyanese people to contrive an outcome that betrays the will of the electorate.”
“My personal view,” Tennassee told Kaieteur Radio, “is that I do not believe that the PNC leadership does not know that they lost the elections. I think they know they lost the election, but they’re not being honest.”
He noted that all of the political parties as well as the international observers have said that the APNU+AFC has lost the election.
“How are you going to say that these reputable international organizations are telling a lie? Why would they tell a lie?” he asked.
“We have had a history where the PNC has developed tremendous expertise to rob elections,” he said, “to organize fraudulent elections.”
One of the issues pointed out is that the coalition leaders are presenting an issue of race to their Afro-Guyanese supporters in an effort to promote an ideology of ethnic nationalism.
“They claim they are speaking for all the African people in Guyana,” Tennassee said. “And they are saying that they fear that if the PPP comes to office, even though they win the elections, and they know that, that there will be what you call ‘Indian domination’. They have presented to the African people a situation that is almost existential. They are telling the African people their very lives are being threatened, that during one of the PPP administrations, about five hundred young Africans were killed. This is a fact; when I go to do listening interviews, I speak to people in the PNC and the PPP and the people in the grassroots, and people of other parties.”
Tennassee said that if the Granger coalition continues to go down this road and “mess up Guyana, there is going to be a very big vacuum in the Afro-Guyanese community for leadership.”
He said that Guyana is lucky now to benefit from a “geopolitical windfall” where the international community has united far and wide in calls for a declaration of the results of the national vote recount, and in defence of democracy in Guyana.
This is a windfall, Tennassee said, that Guyana must use its development after this election saga has ended. He opined that Guyanese will have to organize and work in concert with the international community to bring the Granger dictatorship to its knees in the shortest possible time.
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