Campaign Finance Reform

Dec 12, 2020 Editorial

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Kaieteur News – After every election since 2001, credible observers have made several recommendations on how the process can be made better and more trustworthy. One perennial recommendation that keeps being made and ignored has to do with the issue of campaign financing.
For example, coming out of the 2015 elections, the Carter Center report had as one of its key recommendations:

“Overhaul and Modernize Campaign Finance Laws. To ensure realization of the right and opportunity to be elected, legal reform is necessary to improve campaign finance laws. Legislation should be strengthened to routinely require disclosure of contributions and expenditures. Consideration also should be given to establishing reasonable limits on donations and expenditures to ensure that the free choice of voters is not undermined or the democratic process distorted by disproportionate expenditures on behalf of any candidate or party. A monitoring and enforcement body with oversight authority of compliance with campaign finance regulations would also be a positive contribution to Guyanese politics.”
This sort of recommendation, even though echoed by several other stakeholders, has never found traction with the major political entities in this country, the PPP and the PNC. The Alliance For Change, which started in its early days with a supposed commitment towards campaign finance transparency, has never truly lived up to its professed principle, and quickly became subsumed into the status quo when it joined a coalition with the PNC-led APNU. As covered in the story published in today’s edition, “AFC says corporate reporting covered electoral finance obligations” (pg. 23) , the party has given only the unreliable and irrelevant assurance that their annual reporting as a corporation somehow adheres to their obligations under the electoral finance reporting laws – it does not, by any sane measure.
The only credible information made public about campaign financing from either major party was done so indirectly via compulsory disclosures made by the US lobbying firms that they hired, for the PPP, in the lead up to the March 2 elections and for the Coalition, after in seeking shore up support in Washington for its attempt at rigging the elections.
In relation to possible campaign finance disclosures for the 2020 elections, the answers from the political players who took part in the polls range from the convenient to the incredible. The most absurd response in all this, however, has come not from the political players themselves but from GECOM. If it is that, as Christopher Ram has claimed in our story published yesterday, “PPP/C, APNU+AFC teamed up to hide expense report for 2020 elections – Ram” that GECOM Commissioners advised the Chair, Justice Claudette Singh that the statutory reporting mechanism for elections expenditure was simply ignorable, then we have hit rock bottom when it comes to campaign financing accountability.

Contrary to the postures made by some GECOM Commissioners, their execution of their duties has always been overwhelming in their party’s partisan interest than it is in the interest of law and order. If it is that Commissioners from both sides advised the Chair that they were aware of the law but simply that “those sections were never operationalised”, that had nothing to do with representing the rule of the law or the public’s interest which are both better served by adherence and transparency, and everything to do with the interest of their political masters who benefit from the influx of shadowy funds and zero accountability in how those funds are handled.

The Chair of the Commission, during the five months of attempted rigging, enjoyed an uneven relationship with the public as she was alternatingly seen as accommodating the attempting at rigging or preventing it. She finally sealed the public trust with her firm stance against the inane attempts by Chief Election Officer, Keith Lowenfield, to throw away over 100,000 votes, which would have resulted in giving David Granger a victory in the election, which he had lost. Her submission in the final legal challenges brought by Granger in support of Lowenfield’s corrupt count was critical to the final outcome of the cases. Her stance on campaign financing, if Ram’s account of her response is accurate, threatens to cost her that public confidence she [re]gained during the final weeks of Granger’s derailed coup. It doesn’t matter that the rest of the Commission have advised her that an illegality has become convention – the solution is to act within the law.
In any normal time, the necessity of adequate campaign finance laws and the adherence to them would be critical to a functioning democracy. At a time when the country is now establishing and expanding upon an oil economy, campaign finance laws should have been at the foundation of our new direction. This newspaper has already reported extensively upon the red flags that exist between political players and shadowy oil companies, with more questions than answer available upon how money moves between them. From the absence of information on oil blocks handed out under the Donald Ramotar administration in the lead up to 2015 election to former PNC executive and current senior member James Bond’s US million-dollar payday from an oil and gas affiliate, evidence of the influence of oil industry money on political corruption here is clear.
While the country can receive some protection from our local financial oversight infrastructure and our obligations under international anti-money laundering laws, political campaigns present an enormous blind spot when it comes to corruption as a whole and the influence of corrupt financing over the political, democratic process.
The time for meaningful, comprehensive campaign finance legislation reform is now – the time for basic adherence to the existing laws is already several cycles past. The GECOM Chair needs to revisit and rectify her position on this issue immediately.

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