Why the refusal to describe the March 2020 elections as attempted rigging?

Jun 26, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – My commentary here constitutes a note of suspicion about the motives of Dr. Desmond Thomas, founder of the Electoral Reform Group (ERG). I refer to his latest letter in the Stabroek News of Sunday June 20. In a publication in the Kaieteur News on me of May 28, he reeled off his impressive curriculum vitae and in the process wrote, “I am an economist with a claim to being among the leading economists in the Caribbean Region based on my academic, professional and publications record.”
I don’t know if I was supposed to be impressed by that and be circumspect. I don’t think Dr. Thomas knows me at all. I am relieved that his CV revealed no training and academic output in sociology and political theory. I submit that when he demonstrates a corresponding knowledge in those two subject-areas as he does in economics then we can pay attention to his offering on electoral reform.
My feeling in this article on Dr. Thomas is based on the suspicion I have that he is disinclined to criticise the PNC’s involvement in the March 2020 fiasco. This explains his inflexible unwillingness to categorise the election as a rigging process that failed. Even WPA overseas member, Dr. Alissa Trotz, has come out (in a June interview with UK activist, Norman Brown) and acknowledged that the PNC attempted to rig the process.
In a statement carried in this newspaper, Alfred Bhulai of the Election Reform Group wrote officially on behalf of the group the following position. I use his words “We (the ERG) accept that the March 2020 election was being rigged for five consecutive months until the pressure from the world caused a halt to the rigging.”
Elsewhere I pointed out that all ERG letters carry the signature of its 10 executive members but in this case, only Bhulai added his name. I wrote that I believe this was a deliberate choice of the other nine not to put their names. Now we have another letter from Dr. Thomas and you see the open evasion. There is no mention of the rigged March election.
Here are my words on Thomas published in my column of Wednesday June 2, 2021, captioned The Electoral Reform Group is a devious organism.” But before that, here are the words of Dr. Thomas, “it is disingenuous to suggest that March 2020 is the yardstick to measure the role, legitimacy or credibility of any person or group who may seek to bring improvements to an obviously broken system… agitation on election issues did not start in 2020.”
Here now was my rebuttal to that strange emanation, “What Dr. Thomas is saying here is unadulterated nonsense. Whatever depravities happened in the past that we spoke up against does not exonerate us from denouncing the very depravities that are heaped on Guyana in the present time. This is a barefaced attempt by Dr. Thomas to mask his silence on the election rigging.”
I repeat that I believe Dr. Thomas is a mental supporter of the PNC and he will write for another four years until we come to another election, but he is not going to declare that the PNC attempted to tamper with the March election; to use Dr. Trotz’s words, “fraudulently engineer for itself another term in power.”
His rejection of the consultancy of the Republican Institute in electoral reform is yet to be explained. He is yet to tell us what negative influence the institute’s works will have on the environment of electoral changes. If you are opposing a group’s involvement in a simple process (I believe electoral reform is a simple process), you are morally and intellectually obliged to state why.
He cannot and he would not. My suspicion is that he wants to be part of civil society’s consultation with the government so he can advance a position approximate to the PNC’s postures. My feeling is that in any rendezvous with the PNC on electoral reform, the PNC (and by extension the AFC) is going to be obdurate with the intention of undermining the transformative process.
My theory is that given its global embarrassment over the March 2020 election and the physiological damage it has done to the PNC, there will not be a PNC government or an APNU+AFC government in the foreseeable future. My contestation is that there is going to be an implosion in the PNC over leadership challenges further weakening its biology. The PNC then, will play realpolitik and seek to undermine positive directions in electoral legalism. I hope I am proven wrong. But unlike Dr. Thomas, my field of study is sociology and political behaviour not economics.
(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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