The PNC/R is now shifting blame from GECOM to Granger

Mar 13, 2022 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – After 24 years of political dictatorship between 1968 and 1992, Guyana enjoyed an extended run of democratic governments from 1992 to 2015 under the PPP and then from 2015 to 2020 under the APNU+AFC. But it was no forgone conclusion that the democracy had become firmly entrenched.
The PNC, later the PNC/R, had always exhibited a tendency towards undemocratic behaviour. It had attempted to subvert the 1997 elections and tried to overthrow the PPP/C through street protests. This attempt morphed into a criminal insurgency following the 2001 elections. By 2006, however, the PNC/R was weakened and is no longer in a position to press for extra-legal regime change. It opted instead to pursue its own brand of coalition politics.
That gambit paid off when, along with the Alliance For Change, it was able to deprive the PPP/C, of its parliamentary majority in the 2011 elections. It then joined with the AFC and a number of obscure parties and narrowly won the 2015 general and regional elections.
But despite the favourable change in the country’s voting demographics, the PNC/R still displayed authoritarian and undemocratic instincts while in office. The examples of those have been featured before and are well known to political observers.
Therefore, there is no need for them to be repeated here. Those instincts however, culminated in the attempt to benefit from rigged elections in 2020, one of the most disgraceful episodes in Guyana history and a setback after 28 years of free and fair elections.
The PNC/R has persisted with its discredited narrative that the 2020 elections were rigged. However, for the purposes of its internal politics has now shifted blame for its loss in the elections.
The party’s leadership is now contending that its 2020 campaign was the worst run in the PNC/R’s history. While this contention does not mean that the PNC/R is now abandoning its claim that the 2020 elections were marred with massive irregularities, it does have some implications for that particular discredited narrative.
If the PNC/R’s election campaign was the worst run in the party’s history, then the party should not have expected that it would have won those elections. After all, it did accept that it lost the 2006 elections. So, if the party was more poorly organised in 2020 than it was in 2006, how can the party then expect that it would have done better in 2020 than it did in 2006?
The reason for the shifting of the blame is to discredit the old leadership of the party. To those making these new charges, it will act as a justification for the tactics, which were adopted to force out the old leadership. After all, if it can be established that the 2020 campaign was the worst ran elections in its history, then a credible case can be made out for the then leadership to have been removed.
The reason, however, why daggers were pulled on the former Leader David Granger was not because of the 2020 elections campaign but because of Granger’s decision to approve of the Recount of the votes and his decision to reject the final GECOM declaration, which handed the PPP/C a narrow victory.
Granger faced a mutiny within his party after the election loss. There was a concerted and conspicuous attempt to force him out of office.
He eventually walked away from the leadership after there were no-confidence discussions in regions and groups. This led to factionalism within the party.
The effects of these divisions were evident at the virtual Congress, which was held. The 2021 Congress was the worst ever in the party’s history. Even though it was virtual, there was public airing of the addressing of the outgoing Leader or the report of the outgoing General Secretary. But even more shocking was that there was no assessment done about the party’s performance in the 2020 elections and very little means for the highest organ to have any meaningful input into the decision-making of the party through resolutions, etc.
But if the PNC/R’s ran its worst ever election campaign, how then does one explain the fact that the APNU+AFC coalition got more votes in 2020 than it did in 2015. In 2015, the APNU+AFC secured 207, 201 votes; in 2020 it secured 217, 920, more than 10,000 additional votes.
Given that the voter’s roll was larger than in 2015 and the turnout at the polls only marginally lower than in 2015, the total number of votes cast in favour of the Coalition does not support the claim that PNC/R ran a poor election campaign relative to other elections.

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The PNC/R is now shifting blame from GECOM to Granger

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