The PNC needs to heed the warning of the local 007, James Bond

Jun 28, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – If Berbice has become a global tourist attraction but the Mayor of Berbice tells visitors not to come because there is an outbreak that cannot be controlled then commonsense runs wild – no one will visit Berbice.
If you tell African Guyanese, as Henry Jeffrey wrote recently, that the PPP gets power through election rigging then you are literally, without even an ounce of doubt, informing African Guyanese who vote for the PNC that the PPP is impregnable, omnipresent, and omnipotent. Here are Jeffrey’s words: “Evidence thrown up by the 2020 elections suggest that the PPP is losing its natural ethnic majority, and entrenches its ethnic dominance by manipulating elections to prevent Guyana’s natural progression towards a more accommodative multi-ethnic state.”
This statement appears weird when you glance at it initially. But it has problems for the PNC because there are too many persons aligned to the PNC who are saying and writing things that are consistently damaging the psyche of African Guyanese.
It is for this reason, our local James Bond broke with his party and put out a Facebook post in which he sermonised that if these very PNC aligned people keep telling African-Guyanese that they are being discriminated against and will be discriminated against then you induce pessimism in them and they will have no psychological incentive to seek entrepreneurship. For more on Bond’s warning see my column of Friday, May 19, 2021, “Local 007 put a jumbie lash pon TLF, TUS, CMC, PNL.”
Cast out the asininity in Jeffrey’s output and concentrate on the following reality between 2015 and 2020 and James Bond’s warning becomes stark. For emphasis let us repeat what Jeffrey stated in a nutshell. The PPP is losing its ethnic majority and instead of arriving at compromise for Guyana to become a genuine multi-racial state, it gets into government and stays in power through rigging elections.
As I rebut this contestation, please pay attention to science and acrobatics. In May 2015, after being out of office since 1992, the PNC finally returned to power. The government was headed by David Granger, a former army chief during the reign of President Forbes Burnham. His second in command, Joseph Harmon, was the head of army intelligence during the tenure of Mr. Burnham.
Stalwarts of the PNC became senior Cabinet ministers. The former head of the police force under the PPP government, Winston Felix, became a minister. The former head of the army, Edward Collins, won a seat on the PNC’s executive. He became an advisor to President Granger. Most of the strategic sections of the public sector were headed either by former army officials or PNC personnel.
This was not only the control of power by former army officers and the leadership of the PNC but even in GECOM there were changes. The Deputy Chief Election Officer, Vishnu Persaud, lost his job to Ms. Roxanne Myers in circumstances that the Ethnic Relations Commission found to be highly questionable.
Now the questions are tumbling down like waves from a tsunami. With this kind of seismic changes in government from 2015, how this formidable machinery of former army officers and the leadership of the PNC and new faces in GECOM allowed the PPP to rig the 2020 election and steal power? Above I asked you to pay attention to science and acrobatics.
How it was acrobatically possible for the PPP to rig the election and Mr. Persaud was no longer in GECOM but Ms. Myers was there? How was it scientifically possible for methods and stratagems by the PPP to be used in vastly powerful PNC strongholds like Georgetown, Linden, Bartica, etc., and none of the leaders of government couldn’t see these actions and confront them? Where were the leaders of the PNC and the AFC when on polling day, the PPP set in motion, a train to derail the election?
Two more questions before we return to 007. During the rigging by the PPP where were the three GECOM commissioners? What steps they took to stop the rigging. Finally, why a top leader in the AFC, who is the President’s son-in-law, Dominic Gaskin, denounced the election as being rigged by his own colleagues and elements in GECOM?
If the PNC is going to participate in the 2025 elections, then it has a formidable task to stop people like Jeffrey based on the warning of James Bond. The scientific explanation for why small parties, in the UK, Canada and other countries do not win a majority is because of psychological fixture. Voters feel that these small parties will never win, so they don’t vote for them. If African Guyanese feel the PPP can always rig and win, then the PNC is dead electorally.
(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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