Are Vincent Alexander and others letting down African Guyanese?

Aug 12, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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If you belong to another planet, and you descended upon Guyana on Monday, August 10, 2020 and you read a letter by Vincent Alexander in the Kaieteur News and Stabroek News on the recent election insanity, you will not survive apoplexy when you are told who Vincent Alexander is.
In order to understand how the visitor will get a stroke, you have to read some of the things in Alexander’s letter. Here goes: “The International Decade for People of African Descent-Guyana wrote to Prime Minister Mottley, the then Chairperson of CARICOM, on the occasion of the visit of five CARICOM Prime Ministers, indicating that Guyana’s problems are deep-seated and that elections only manifest the problem. We beseeched them to look beyond elections, if their real interest was to lend a helping hand to the peoples of Guyana. To date the honourable ones, with our lives in their hands, have not even acknowledged receipt of our exhortations.”
Why did Alexander hope for a reply? The answer is that he thought the five prime ministers were stupid. Alexander signed the letter but the CARICOM PMs knew he was part of rigging the election. They had to figure that if this gentleman sees a larger picture than the meaning of election, then why is he part of a three-man team from one of the parties that contested the election and is rigging it to get his party in power only to further the ethnic divide.
The question is: was Alexander involved in election fraud? The answer is yes. He would have had access to the Statements of Polls (SOPs) as a GECOM commissioner on the early morning of March 3, 2020 that the Chief Elections Officer (CEO) had in his possession. Those SOPs showed APNU+AFC lost. Yet on, Saturday, March 7, the CEO was summoning a formal meeting of GECOM to endorse the fraud thus allowing for the swearing in of the loser.
From March 7, until the end of July when the Court of Appeal ruled on the validity of the recount, Alexander tenaciously clung to the advocacy that the March 7 declaration of an APNU+AFC victory was valid and should be used to declare a result. Alexander even tabled a motion for that declaration to be adopted by GECOM.
This very gentleman wrote the five PMs exhorting them to use context to see the deeper meaning of Guyana’s sociology than the periodic presence of national elections. But the five PMs had to see it as an act of self-insult that they would accept the exhortation of a GECOM commissioner, involved in election fraud, using the name of an African organization.
Let’s quote Alexander again: “Similarly, after the riotous day, post E-Day, on the West Coast of Berbice, the United Nations Human Rights Council was written to, drawing their attention to the situation which we considered to be a Human Rights issue being manifest at elections time. They too have not taken any action.”
In the case of the five CARICOM PMs, Alexander thought the UN Human Rights Council consisted of stupid people. The election violence was a response to Mingo’s imposition of fictional figures thereby destroying the legitimacy of a country’s national election in which GECOM commissioners like Alexander were guilty participants.
Alexander’s implorations to five CARICOM PMs and the UN had to be met with non-reply because the advocacy was coming from someone who was a GECOM commissioner and GECOM was accused by respected international organizations and governments close to CARICOM countries of electoral fraud. I have always perceived Alexander as being very intelligent but did he really think that the five PMs and the UN would have listened to him as head of the International Decade for People of African Descent-Guyana and ignore what he was doing as a GECOM commissioner?
One final quote from Alexander: “Elections and Democracy are well and good, all things being equal. In Guyana, all things are not equal. Elections and the “so called democracy” are therefore dysfunctional and only exacerbate rather than resolve our problems.” This is either amazing dishonesty or depraved barefacedness. If Alexander believes that elections exacerbate Guyana’s perennial ethnic animosities and democracy cannot be secured through so-call election victories, then how this same gentleman could have done two things.
One is table a motion at a statutory meeting of GECOM to accept the declaration that contained Mingo’s fraudulent numbers. The other is why from March 7 to July, almost five months, he persisted in upholding and calling for a declaration based on Mingo’s illegal numbers? Alexander did not serve the cause of African Guyanese when he wrote the five PMs and the UN, on the contrary, he let them down.

(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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