No place for riggers in a democracy

Oct 04, 2021 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The PNC attempt at electoral banditry never ceased after 1985. Except for in 2006 when it was comprehensively whipped at the polls and suffered a fallout from the criminal insurrection, the PNC/R has tried all manner of mischief to hijack elections.
Its new sidekick, the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), has no moral authority much less political credibility to criticise the PPP/C. One of the WPA’s leaders went as far as calling for the ballot boxes to be thrown aside. He certainly would not have said that if the Coalition had won the elections.
The WPA now rails against the PPP/C’s refusal to invite the Leader of the Opposition for talks. The PPP/C’s position is that it cannot do so while the APNU+AFC refuse to recognise it as the elected government.
But the WPA had refused to recognise the PNC as a legitimate force when the WPA tabled its proposal for a Government of National Unity and Reconstruction. The WPA was then so appalled over the PNC’s lack of democratic credentials that it had no place for the PNC in Guyana’s political future. As far as it was concerned then, the PNC was a dictatorship and could not have a role in any government of national unity.
The WPA is fully au fait with the electoral banditry of the PNC/R and its attempts since 1992 to destabilise elected governments. The WPA did not participate in the 1980 elections because it felt that the PNC would have rigged those elections, which it did. But after the collapse of the Grenada Revolution and the WPA’s switch from being a Marxist party to an ill-defined Rodneyite party, the WPA entered the 1985 election and became a victim of the worst rigging in the country’s history.
The WPA wants us now to believe that the PPP/C is the villain and practices domination. But it is successive PPP/C governments which have been subject to a relentless campaign of destabilisation at the hands of the PNC, except for the period 2006-2011.
This campaign to undermine democratically elected governments and to falsely claim fraud began even before the results of the October 5, 1992 elections were made public.
Mobs were mobilised outside of the Guyana Elections Commission headquarters, which was then on Croal Street. The mob eventually began to stone the building in an attempt to stop the elections which a faction in the PNC feared the party would lose.
Former US President Jimmy Carter, who was in Guyana as part of his Carter Centre’s Observer Mission to the elections, said he had never feared for his life so much as he did then. When Carter arrived at the GECOM Headquarters, there was already a hostile mob outside.   He called President Hoyte and told him that the building was not properly protected and that if he did not receive immediate protection from the mob outside, the Secret Service would contact the White House. Hoyte took action to quell the mob outside GECOM’s Headquarters.
But that was not the end of the violence. On the day after the elections, when it was reported that the PPP/C had won 70 percent of the vote on the Essequibo Coast riots broke out in the city. Stores were looted and burnt. This was the PNC’s salute to democracy.
After the party lost again in 1997, it unleashed a campaign of violence and destabilisation under the banner of “slo fyah, mo fyah”.
Here again it was attempting to fraudulently install itself in government on the pretext that it had won the 1997 elections. Then in 2001, the violence morphed in criminal terror following the jailbreak.  The country has never recovered from that period.
In 2006, facing a backlash from its actions since 1992, the PNC accepted its humiliation at the polls but it was back to it wicked ways in 2011 when it sought to question the results of an election which deprived the PPP/C of a majority in the National Assembly.
Despite winning the 1992, 1997, 2001 and 2006 elections, the PPP/C has never been able to host a public victory celebration because every time it won, there was instability triggered by the PNC.
That changed in 2020. The PPP/C was determined last year to enjoy its moment of victory after having to wait five months for its winning candidate to be sworn in.  It was during those five months that one person within the WPA leadership tried to peddle his poisonous views within this newspaper. The Publisher had to let him know that the Kaieteur News was not going down that road.
The President is perfectly in order to demand that he be recognised before he initiates any meeting with the Leader of the Opposition. To do otherwise would be to court disrespect. Eventually the two will have to meet but for the time being those who tried to benefit from an attempt to rig elections must be ostracised locally and internationally.
The PNC/R, the AFC and the WPA have no place in a democratic society. They are pariah parties which cannot be reformed. The call therefore, for them to reject publicly election rigging, is like asking the devil to become a saint.
(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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