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The last refuge of the electoral charlatan
Kaieteur News – There was a man I knew, a domino player, who possessed the most extraordinary talent. He always lost. He did not lose nobly. No, he lost noisily, extravagantly, like a man putting on a show for an ungrateful audience.
Each defeat produced a new conspiracy. The others were peeping at his cards. They were rapping the table when they had plays. They were whispering to one another. He could never be beaten fair and square, because in his imagination, he was destined to win. Only cheating could account for his downfall.
And then one afternoon, like a miracle, he won. But winning was a problem, you see. Losing had become his identity, and accusation his only language. So, when victory came, he cried cheat again. He had been robbed even of his win. Such was his genius that he could turn triumph into grievance.
That man was an allegory in shorts and slippers. He was the PNC before my eyes. The party had rigged itself into power for so long that it forgot the grammar of honest elections. In 1992, when it finally had to face the people and the Carter Center, it lost and cried rigging. Imagine the irony. A party fattened on ballot-box stuffing suddenly discovering virtue in clean elections and claiming to be cheated by foreigners.
The Carter Center stayed away in 1997. The PNC lost again. And once more the rigging chorus filled the air, as predictable as rain in May. Tires burned, windows smashed, Georgetown stank of tear gas and bad faith.
By 2001 the tale became darker. They whispered of tampering, and out of their whisper came gunmen. For years the country was held hostage to gangs born of the party’s refusal to accept arithmetic. The criminal insurgency fed on fictions of electoral fraud.
In 2006, the beast slept. They licked their wounds in silence. But by 2011 the habit returned, and with it came farce. The PPP/C lost its majority but not the presidency. It should have been a moral victory for the opposition, but they preferred the old refrain: rigged, rigged, rigged. I remember one supporter in particular. Along Lamaha Street, outside the hospital, he threw himself prostrate before the march, shouting, “He gat to go!” The man was aflame with passion but dressed only in vest and underpants. He had rushed from his home so eager to topple a government that he forgot his trousers. There, on the asphalt, half-naked and ridiculous, he was the perfect emblem of the movement: exposed, loud, and absurd.
And then came 2020, the great comedy of errors stretched across five months. The APNU+AFC tried every trick in the rigging handbook. Spreadsheets altered like schoolboy homework; tallies pulled from thin air. And when caught, they produced another fiction. First, they claimed victory. Then, dead men had voted. Migrants too. The contradictions piled higher than the ballot boxes. CARICOM called it a “fishing expedition.” But it was less fishing than floundering, a desperate thrash in shallow waters. When it was over, the coalition stood disgraced, humiliated before the region and the world.
And yet, like my domino companion, they could not simply lose. They required a new narrative. Policy, they had none. Their years in government were a record of promises unfulfilled. They pledged inquiries into extra-judicial killings: nothing. They swore to prosecute PPP/C corruption: not a single conviction. Police reform, thousands of jobs, shared governance, investigations into the sugar scandals—all vanished like dew in the sun. Their government was a monument to inertia.
So, what weapon remained? Not competence. Not credibility. Only the most poisonous and most convenient refuge: race. If you cannot win votes, you can at least inflame hatreds. On the West Coast Berbice they tried. They whispered of persecution, of one group against another. But the old poison has lost its sting; people saw it for what it was, a trick of desperate men.
Now in 2025 the excuses continue. GECOM, the elections body, is the new villain. They say it cannot be trusted. They cast suspicion like fishermen casting nets, hoping to haul in doubt where none exists. With the PNC, there are always more accusations than arguments, more conspiracies than solutions. It is a party condemned to invent its own reality, like my domino player, cheated even in victory, robbed even of what it never had.
You can bet another excuse is coming. Who knows it may even have already landed.
(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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Who is the writer of the article: The last refuge of the electoral charlatan.
Does this individual write the Peeping Tom article every day ?