PNC and AFC are going to kill innocent, poor people next week

Aug 28, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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The PNC and AFC are going to file an election petition next week. In a forthcoming column, I will examine the asininity behind that writ since the PNC will have to produce at the trial, the thing that they have hidden since March 4 – the statements of poll (SOPs) which showed it lost the election. Even their partner in crime, the AFC told the media last week, that it never saw the SOPs.
In announcing the petition, Joe Harmon is urging PNC (not AFC since AFC no longer has any supporters) to turn out in large numbers to show solidarity. I refer to my column of Thursday, April 16, 2020 captioned, “The election conspirators are going to make thousands die from COVID.”
Here is what I wrote three months ago: “All the warnings for Guyana are dire. The latest are from Dr. Fawcett Jeffrey, Director of Medical Services at the Georgetown Hospital. He said that the hospital can be overwhelmed with an influx of victims. He looked at the availability of beds and ventilators. I saw clips of APNU+AFC supporters in their dozens chanting support for the APNU+AFC and they were all without masks and actually within touching distance of each other. The police did not disperse them. Is it possible that some of those persons became victims? They were brought to court by APNU+AFC activists.”
From which economic classes those protestors are coming from? They will not be even from the upper working class ladders or even from the lower middle tiers. These will be working class citizens coming from low income areas of Georgetown and from poor households in the PNC’s rural constituencies. They will gather in large numbers ignoring social distance requirements. A large number of them will not be donning facial protection and they will be talking loudly in the faces of fellow protestors.
I saw small children taken by their mothers to listen to President David Granger outside State House after the Caribbean Court of Justice ruled against APNU+AFC. Granger didn’t wear a mask. In addressing them, Granger didn’t utter one word about caution. I saw mothers with their little children outside the courts in April during the election court battle. Many of them did not have face gear. Do you think PNC leaders do not know that per capita, Guyana has one of the highest COVID-19 afflictions in the entire world? Per capita, we may be number 3, 4 or 5.
Against that horribly frightening statistics, how any leader in a country vastly under-resourced to deal with a deluge of COVID-19 cases can exhort his supporters to defy COVID-19 restrictions and turn out in massive numbers? This is criminal irresponsibility. But let’s turn our attention to the class position of the man who is asking PNC supporters to flock to the courts next week.
Harmon was chief of intelligence in the army and after retirement went to study law. Prior to going into government, he headed a law firm situated four blocks from where I was born on Hadfield Street, Wortmanville. It is named IBIS Law Chambers, in Werk-en-Rust, one block away from where Walter Rodney met his death. Directly outside of IBIS Law Chambers on Hadfield Street, on the parapet, sits the monument in honour of Rodney. Just before, I move on, a slight digression. Harmon was military intelligence chief at the time Rodney was assassinated. Is it possible to say that he had no working knowledge of the plot; just asking?
When in June 2015 when the APNU+AFC Cabinet gave itself a massive salary increase, here is what Harmon told the press in justification. He said that in IBIS Chambers, he pays his junior lawyers, half a million a month; therefore, it was natural for Cabinet members who leave private employment, to be adequately compensated. I am not dealing with the salary increase here. I am referring to the class position of Harmon. If his juniors earned half a million a month, then Harmon is not a working class politician but comes from the upper middle class tier.
It is this kind of gentleman that is asking poor, PNC supporters to risk their lives to turn out outside the court in tropical conditions that will be unbearable. How can any sane mind support these PNC leaders? Is this the kind of recklessness society should turn a blind eye to? But guess what? Here is the tragic part of Guyana’s sociology. Those who do not like those PNC supporters no doubt will cynically say quietly to their families, relatives and friends: “Let them go, who cares if COVID-19 kills them, even their own leaders don’t care.”

(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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