SOP fiasco morphs into vaccination and dismissed employees

Sep 06, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News– I have no objection at an absolute level of people criticising the government of the day that they do not want to see hold the reins of office. That is their basic right. Why should PNC and AFC parliamentarians and PNC and AFC leaders go on Facebook and praise the performance of the government when they want to displace the ruling party so they could be in office.
Opposition parties are in business to win elections. They have to persuade people that the ruling party is not doing good. I do not think there is any country in the world when you open the newspaper or turn on the television, there are opposition parliamentarians waxing lyrical about the excellent things the government is doing.
The ruling party on the other hand, will reply. It is their job to confront the propaganda of their detractors. And so life goes. It is a different matter altogether when you say that you won the singing contest because eight of the 12 judges voted for you, yet none of the eight could be produced to say yes. What happens then is that you are deceiving your fans. You have created space for them to cuss down the organisers wrongfully.
What the PNC and AFC, their surrogates and racist propagandists on radio and Facebook are doing for the past 19 months, is reinforcing the announcement that they won the March 2020 election. Yet every conceivable piece of paper that they need to show their supporters as evidence, they are refusing to show.
If you are an admirer of that singer that believes eight judges voted for him, then as an ardent fan, you have to demand that your idol presents the eight judges or at least one or two or three of them. If he cannot produce even one then, you must start thinking for yourself. There comes a time when the normal thinking human is going to come around to the conclusion that something is wrong.
Sherwood Lowe, an open supporter of the PNC, wrote that PNC supporters have come around to the acceptance that it lost the election properly. See my column of Tuesday, August 24, 2021, “African Guyanese deserve intellectual honesty from their leaders,” for what Lowe wrote. He noted that: “The coalition must confront the reality that a majority of its supporters have accepted, at various stages since March 2020 that it lost the last election properly.”
Careful attention should be paid to the words, “AT VARIOUS STAGES.” What happened is that as the months wore on from March 2020, at different points in time, PNC and AFC supporters began to question the veracity of their leaders because the documentary proof was not forthcoming. Three examples should be noted.
One is that even though they are shouting from Georgetown to New York that they won, they were not showing anyone their statements of poll (SOPs). Make no mistake, had Mark Benschop seen those SOPs, every night he would have shown them to the world. Even the most devout supporter of rigged elections, David Hinds, has not seen them even though I was told that he has asked Joseph Harmon personally for them.
The second one is the Russian interference explanation by Khemraj Ramjattan and Cathy Hughes. That was announced on March 5 and since then, not a word was ever said about the Russian “invaders.” Thirdly, Ramjattan announced to his staff at a special meeting at his ministry that the APNU+AFC lost. Then the next day denied he said that even though the 40-minute audio is available. I ask PNC and AFC supporters to listen to it.
So, from March 2020, the bucket collapsed in the well thus the position of Sherwood Lowe. The SOP circus has now morphed into the vaccination drama and story of dismissed employees. Mr. Harmon took his vaccine yet denounced it, including feelings in his supporters to reject taking it.
A deceptive game is now being played. The PNC allows three PNC affiliated trade unions to take the vaccination programme to court while hiding in the background. One of the unforeseen disasters of that court case will be the rejection of trade unions by incoming investing companies which will see trade unionism in this country as driven by party loyalty and not workers’ interests.
Finally, the PNC stated that over 2,000 African Guyanese state employees have been dismissed since August last year. The PNC produced documents last June which purported to show people outside came in to vote in the March election. It is yet to produce the list of the dismissed employees. It can’t. It doesn’t exist. Fooling people is the only game in town. (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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