A mystery during the five months of rigging now explained

Dec 19, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – In all the analyses from independent commentators, no one has touched on a mystery during the five months of election rigging. It was on Tuesday, March 3, that international and local observers detected a fishy movement in the command centre of GECOM – there was an abrupt halt to the last stage of the counting of the votes.
Nine Regions were completed and accepted by GECOM with Region Four still to be finalized. The next day, March 4, the world saw that the 2020 election was being rigged when Clairmont Mingo began to insert fictional numbers into the Region Four tabulation. When that happened, it forced the international observers and the PPP/C to release statements of poll that revealed the loss by the incumbent. Knowing that it had lost, the APNU and the AFC, as two separate entities, went on the offensive with shouts of victory.
Of the two entities, the AFC fired off the first salvo of going on the attack. The next day, Thursday, March 5, Cathy Hughes and Khemraj Ramjattan held a press conference at the PNC’s election campaign head office at Lamaha and Camp Streets and informed the nation that the government had intercepted a group of Russians, that came to tamper with the election, and they were arrested and deported.
Research on the attitudes of the leaders of PNC and AFC would show that from Friday, March 6 onto August 1, the day Granger conceded defeat, there was no longer any mention of the Russian dimension. Here was a brilliant strategy of deception in politics that could have paid dividends in a world torn between big power rivalry, but both the PNC and AFC dropped it immediately after March 6. If the incumbent cried about American intervention then that could have found ears in Canada, the UK and Washington. Why was this horse not flagged?
From March 6 to August 1, the Russian intervention was avoided like the plague in the countless descriptions of the PNC and AFC of what the PPP did. There was the dossier prepared by a relative of President Granger, Michael Granger, as contracted by the PR firm, JJ&B, which was hired by the PNC. The dossier linked the PPP/C with China and argued that a PPP/C victory would see the PPP/C take Guyana into the orbit of both China and Russia. But there were no details of Russian election tampering.
Joe Harmon was the front man for the cries of PNC and AFC. He cited the following – deliberate discarding of the thousands of ballots of the security forces; migrants long gone from Guyana had voted; dead people with names on the voters’ list voted; crucial documents were missing in many ballot boxes.
Chris Jones and Sherod Duncan ran a nightly Facebook feature denouncing the PPP/C tampering but no mention of the Russians. Dr. Melissa Ifill, the Deputy Vice Chancellor of UG, asserted that the American firm, Mercury, shaped the narrative for a PPP/C victory but she did not cite the Russians. Dr. David Hinds, Rickford Burke and Mark Benschop, from their homes in the US incited every night, cussed down every night but not a word about Russian involvement.
By the end of July when Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, literally threatened Granger with sanctions from international law in a telephone conversation that Granger initially refused to take, the Russian strategy was long dead. Why did the PNC and AFC kill the Russian thing? Here is what happened that has never been made public.
After Hughes and Ramjattan told the world about the Russians, the US Embassy contacted Ramjattan and asked for more details. He was the Minister of Public Security so he would be in possession of the documents. Interestingly, Ramjattan gave oral details but declined to offer documents, which he said, were a security matter that had to be okayed by Cabinet. Ramjattan thought he was on safe ground because Cabinet was not meeting and would not be meeting, so no documents.
The US Embassy knew Ramjattan and Hughes were playing games. Weeks passed and the American Embassy received no documents. When Ramjattan was not forthcoming, the US Embassy asked President Granger for information. The Russian stratagem died there and then. The Office of the President informed the US Embassy that it knew nothing about the Russian involvement and heard about it from the AFC press conference.
The Embassy then informed the Canadian, EU and UK diplomats that the Russian thing was fake news. The PNC had no interest in the Russian story because it knew that it was a wild card the AFC introduced into the arena that was a pathetic sight.

(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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