Honesty is the best policy

Jan 13, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – If the APNU+AFC is serious about assessing, truthfully and honestly, its loss in the 2020 elections, it has to cease the parody, halt the blame-game and be prepared to be forthright about its record of governance.
The APNU+AFC continues to make itself look comical with its Trump-like complaint that it was cheated out of an elections victory because the dead and migrants came out and voted. The concocted and puerile excuse which the APNU+AFC attempted to deceive its supporters with, was itself the very excuse which the PNC used to deny democracy in Guyana for almost a quarter of a century.
One PNC/R leader went on national television and announced that the dead rose from their internment, voted and then promptly went back to the cemetery. The leader also alleged that overseas residents voted.
That leader’s excuse could well have been lifted from an extract of Guyanese Roy Heath’s novel, The Ministry of Hope, in which he described the PNC’s rigging of elections. Heath wrote of the PNC/R, “They had things their own way for more than two decades with their falsified registers and mysterious resurrections of the dead, who appeared at polling stations, voted and promptly returned to their resting places in cemeteries all over the country; not to mention the transmigration of would-be citizens domiciled overseas, whose ocean-skipping antics would have done justice to the comic-strip plastic man.”
Until such time as the APNU+AFC disabuses itself believing its own propaganda, it will continue to issue delusional statements and to be entrapped by its own silly excuses, rather than facing up to the factors which resulted in its defeat at the March 2 polls.
It also has to dispense with the blame-game. It will end up condemning the entire community by the time its delusional saga ends. First it was the Russians who it was said were behind the plot to erase APNU+AFC votes. It never produced a shred of evidence to substantiate Russian manipulation in the elections, resorting instead to science fiction and espionage to explain its electoral defeat.
Then when its attempt to steal the elections backfired, including due to the international community rejection of the BINGO plot to tamper with the tabulations, the APNU+AFC resorted to blaming the Americans for what it said was a conspiracy of regime change. The Coalitions should have asked themselves how it is within a short period of five years, it moved from being the darlings of the West to running afoul of them. They even targeted Caribbean leaders after the CARICOM audit team rejected their allegations of electoral fraud as a “fishing expedition.”
The blame-game continues now again with another APNU+AFC leader alleging that Global Witness was involved in influencing the outcome of the 2020 elections. The said leader did not address how it was that with the resources of the massive state-media at its disposal, his Coalition failed to contradict anything which was said in the Global Witness Report on the oil negotiations.
There is more in the mortar than on the pestle when it comes to Global Witness’ decision to withdraw a report it had done on the oil deal because of the need not to be sidetracked from its core mission of addressing climate change. The media needs to investigate the real reasons why Global Witness is now concentrating on climate change and shifting away from its criticizms of the oil and gas industry, especially considering that fossil fuels is one of the primary contributors to global greenhouse gas emissions.
One of the champions of the environment, Conservation International, has strangely gone silent over the threat of Exxon’s flaring to the environment. In fact it has hardly lifted a finger to speak out against the oil companies. And its silence was all the more deafening after Conservation International benefited from US$10M from the oil company in 2018.
The APNU+AFC is not likely to return to political office in the foreseeable future. It shot itself in the foot by its antics during the five months between March 2, 2020 and August 2, 2020.
But the least it owes itself and the thousands of supporters who voted for it, to at least try to understand why it was rejected by a majority of Guyanese. Unless its engages in this form of introspection, it will find itself being supplanted by other parties and be reduced to a footnote in Guyana’s political future.

(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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