Granger ignored Lewis, will Trump ignore Flynn?

Dec 23, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – Lincoln Lewis of Guyana and Michael Flynn of the USA are two dangerously ignorant men. Flynn of course is far more educated than Lewis and is far less crass and intellectually empty than Lewis so one expected better of him. Flynn was an award-winning general in the US army. Lewis on the other hand is a one-man army in the trade union congress.
Why are they insipidly stupid? Let’s quote Lewis first. After endorsing the work of the GECOM chairperson, Ms. Claudette Singh, Lewis suffered a mild mental stroke when in late July, Ms. Singh accepted the CARICOM observed election recount thus accepting an opposition victory – the incumbent PNC-AFC was defeated.
Anticipating Singh’s declaration of a PPP win, here is what Lewis publicly said on the radio station run by Mark Benschop who lives in the US, “If the Elections Commission’s actions are inimical to the interest and intent of the Constitution and the ethos of this country, then President Granger will have to take action. Whatever form it is. We can’t have an election that is marred with discrepancies that we consider as rigged… Mr. Granger will have to take action, if the Elections Commission fails the people of the country.”
If he wasn’t so ignorant and if he had done elementary research, Lewis would know that in all the countries that have free and fair elections and a written constitution, the president is not above the constitution. In Guyana, during his presidency, the High Court and the Caribbean Court of Appeal ruled that President Granger was not above the constitution seven times.
Under Guyana’s constitution, the president cannot even select the chairman of the election body much less intervene and reject the decision of the election commission. Interesting to note is that Lewis avoided any mention in his gesticulating morbidity that the man he was urging to confront GECOM was a presidential candidate in the very election, the result of which he lost. That very loser Lewis appealed to, for him to scrap the result and stay in power. So a presidential candidate loses an election and he just decides to guillotine the body that ran the election and pronounced on the results and stays in power.
Maybe that is how the trade union congress runs its elections with Lewis at the helm. It doesn’t work like that in Guyana and Guyanese did not give Lewis and Granger even an inch to touch GECOM. Granger of course being more intelligent and educated than Lewis knew better and accepted Ms. Singh’s declaration. Over in the US, close confidante of President Trump, former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn, is advising Trump to declare a state of emergency so as to undermine the assumption of the presidency by the winner of the 2020 election, Joe Biden.
We know in Guyana that the president did not accept Lewis’ asininity and thus conceded victory. Will Trump embrace Flynn’s advice? The world has to wait and see but the implications of the exhortation of Lewis and Trump are horrible and horrific. When an incumbent loses, he/she must not accept the result. This is what Lewis told Guyanese. This is what Flynn is telling Americans.
If humans behave the way Lewis and Flynn want them to, then this world, since the birth of free and fair elections after the 19th century, would have just a handful of leaders. Why? Because government simply would not change hands because you do not have losers only winners and since the winners cannot lose then the world will see only a small amount of leaders.
It is interesting to note that the circumstances of the advocacy of Lewis and Flynn are identical. In Guyana, not one major organization accepted Granger’s claim to victory even the rabid anti-PPP entity, ACDA did not proclaim a PNC triumph. There wasn’t even a lone voice in Africa, Europe, Asia, South America that endorsed Granger’s claim of re-election.
In the US, the Republican Party has not, in a united front accepted Trump’s claim of victory. We tend to judge people by the society they live in. When you belong to a rich, industrialized nation with untold wealth, post-modern infrastructure, hundreds of universities, thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, television stations, you tend to see the mentality of such people as more enlightened.
That is a fallacy and has no scientific basis. People are all the same no matter where they live, no matter how rich or poor they are, no matter which race they were born into. Flynn from the richest country in the world offered his president the very advice that Lewis from a poor Third World country did.

(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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