Significant political struggle required

Feb 03, 2025 Letters

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Dear Editor

In 2021, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government engaged the United States Republican Party-associated International Republican Institute (IRI) to be the operational leader of the election reform process. A poll conducted for IRI by a Latin American firm CID Gallup in January 2022 concluded that regarding the credibility of elections results only 38% of those polled believe that they reflected the will of the people and 51% believed they did not. To the question as to whether they believed that the declared official election results reflected the will of the people, only an average of 22% of the population (16% Africans, 28% East Indians, 21% Indigenous, and 20% mixed people) said ‘definitely yes’.

This is possibly the most objective political poll done in Guyana over the last two decades and is a telling condemnation of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) whose mandate as an independent electoral management body is to conduct free and fair elections. Perhaps as electoral manipulation has become so normalized, GECOM, which in one form or another has been at the centre of this mischief, missed the significance of the above conclusion.

It must have been so, or some kind of conspiracy is afoot, for notwithstanding other indications and warnings that what it is doing is not working, it is proceeding towards the 2025 elections with the process largely unchanged. It is as if the claims and counterclaims of massive voter impersonations that again arose during the 2020 elections and are yet to be adequately dealt with in the courts, did carry any weight with GECOM when for other democratically orientated stakeholders, it was a major concern. Thus, the 2020 Caricom Recount team stated that a minimum condition for holding any future elections should be a new voters list, and the European Union Overserver Mission suggested that the existing list is bloated and that there should be consensual electoral reforms.

Even if one puts aside, as self-interested, the persistent demands of the official opposition for the adoption of an improved biometric system, in this kind of problematical context, an independent electoral management body with perhaps – apart from parliament and the judiciary – the greatest legal authority in the land should not have had to wait on anyone to take the initiative and where necessary make the necessary recommendations.  Biometrics systems, over which there is much quarrel, are particularly useful in dealing with voter impersonation, have been around for decades and are familiar to GECOM.

According to Kaieteur News, a recent GECOM press release on biometrics stated that, ‘the benefits highlighted include a high level of security, as biometrics are unique to each individual, making it difficult for fraudulent activities such as impersonation or multiple voting to occur. The use of biometrics also offers a more accurate method of voter identification compared to traditional methods like ID cards or signatures, thereby reducing the chances of errors in the electoral process, guarding against electoral fraud. It also ensures the integrity of the voting process, and the use of biometric fingerprints can streamline the voter identification process, leading to faster and more efficient voting’ (KN: 29/01/2025).

However, having failed over many years to take the initiative and do its essential constitutional duty to provide the Guyanese people with a government they can consider legitimate, GECOM now adds insult to injury by telling us that biometrics could be beneficial but that it is too late for them to be implemented! And seeks to confuse us with a plethora of minutiae, many of which are present in any delivery system but are all mainly located in factors, including legality, timing and funding, that are in the control of the ruling party.

It said that there are legal and technical challenges, poor network connectivity, power outages, hardware malfunctions, and software glitches, difficulty in accommodating the elderly and persons with disabilities, difficulties with fingerprint scanning, disenfranchisement, storing biometric data, possible fraudulent activities, infrastructure challenges in the hinterland, voter education, resistance by political parties, and issues of public trust.

To repeat, in 2012, Ghana, a country with 25 million persons and a much larger hinterland, delivered verification machines, new voter identification cards featuring head shots, etc., to all its 26,000 polling stations and completed the entire process in 6 weeks. Importantly, the new system was also effective in identifying 8,000 double registrations, 6,000 of which were fraudulent!

GECOM’s wish to rely on timing is unacceptable at the specific and general levels. At the specific level, the case of Ghana makes GECOM’s position extremely questionable and should be backed by independent assessments. GECOM’s task is to provide a legitimate government and whatever it has been doing thus far has not done so. At the general level notions of ‘timing’ must be related to the quest for legitimate governance. Just to remind, it was this objected that facilitated the PPP’s return to power in 1992, when national and international pressure forced the People’s National Congress (PNC) to extend its term of office by some two years to reform the electoral system.

Thus, constitutional and legal provisions are not cast in stone. Constitutions and laws are made by people for people and when they are inappropriate, they must be changed. Perhaps partly because of not making a fetish of existing constitutional provisions, Switzerland, which arguably has the most appropriate governance arrangement for our epoch, has reformed their federal constitution on average about once a year since its adoption in 1848.

Historically, in Guyana and elsewhere, national elections management bodies have been fought over and sometimes are captured by one of the competing political parties, and it appears that this is what has happened in Guyana, where over many years GECOM has consistently taken the side of the ruling party and now, without clearly identifying its specific responsibilities, rests its incapacity to improve the existing dysfunctional status quo in the factors that are solely in the control of that party. The question must, therefore, arise as to where GECOM’s loyalties are -with the PPP or the population?

Most Guyanese are quite aware of the fraudulent realities of Guyanese governance that have over decades prevented the optimal use of our resources. The IMF claimed that some 41% of Guyana government’s capital budget – at present US$738 billion – is wasted by forms of inefficiency (https://guyanabusinessjournal.com).  In the Forbes Burnham era, the fraud was rooted largely in geopolitical concerns; today it is embedded in purely personal and ethnic anxieties. What is required at this juncture are reforms that replace the existing colonialist-type divide and rule by more consensual arrangements that will effectively hold governments accountable.

Not so long ago, I read a substantial piece from the Guyana Trade Union Congress calling for the introduction of biometrics, but we are told by one PPP GECOM commissioner that ‘No other political or social entity, apart from the PNC and AFC have called for the introduction of biometrics. The political opposition are alone on this one’ (KN: 01/02/2025), Maybe GTUC is PNC like FITUG, and GAWU are PPP!  The PPP is comfortable with its autocratic governance, and it will take a significant political struggle to cause it discomfiture. The holding of creditable elections focused upon creating legitimate governance could provide the catalyst by further exhibiting the existing electoral realities that ethnic democratic governance needs to accommodate. What is happening at GECOM is only the more visible element of a system that must be confronted by a non-violent political struggle, and there are some 200 methods of nonviolent protest and persuasion to choose from (Gene Sharp ‘The Politics of Nonviolent Action’ (3 Vols.) Boston: Porter Sargent, 1973).

Sincerely
Dr. Henry Jeffrey

(Significant political struggle required)

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• election reform process, GECOM, operational leader, People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government, Republican Party-associated International Republican Institute (IRI)

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