Elections 2025… Lesson 4 – Major reforms needed

Sep 10, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The good neighbour people that I place under the tent of the International Election Observer Mission(s) had a large mouthful to say about the recently concluded Guyana Elections of 2025.  The large mouthful was compressed into three words: major reforms needed.  Say that again, please, folks.  Major reforms needed.

Why is that necessary when I hear/heard so much of how the electoral process was streamlined, how it was fit as a championship boxer and ready to punch above its weight?  Note that it is not just reforms-ordinary, routine, negligible-needed, but major reforms that are a must.  Well, blow me down the Demerara River.

First question for all Guyanese, winners and losers, delirious and desultory, when someone is in need of major surgery, what could be said about the condition of that body?  It certainly cannot be that it is healthy.  By subtraction that leaves the sickly, as in diseased and distressed and in a dangerous condition. If the tree is so rottenly bad, how can it produce good fruit?  I am sure that every Guyanese, including those who may disagree with me publicly and vehemently, know in their heart of hearts that this is where Guyana is in terms of its electoral environment, and its related procedures and processes.  By the way, it is fine to disagree publicly; to do so in a dirty way is a waste of time and chronic squandering of the people’s resources.  Neither reception nor traction.

So here we are in the ecstasies and ebullience of elections success, on the one hand.  And there are the foreign folks, who stand on a rooftop and shout to the world about major reforms needed.  I don’t know, nor care, if others agree with the logic that follows.  Since the electoral process had so many deep holes, so many huge gaps, then what was that creature that was just given a steam bath and called elections?  More specifically, a clean and clear and convincing one?  Recall what I said earlier: if the patient is in a coma, or hovers in and out of one, no one should expect the miracle of that same poly fellow as a participant in a triathlon.  I don’t.  Who does?  Who in Guyana could be so, ah, untoward, so unseemly, that they dig in their heels, bury their heads up to their navels in the sand, and come up with what they holdout as reasonable?

Let us all be on the same page.  Victory is victory, and there is no quibbling from this corner.  Done deal.  Over and out.  But this is just one of several postmortems.  Learning comes from a willingness to examine the past, as in recent history.  After all, it is not I, who said that major reforms are in order; but people a thousand times smarter than I could ever be.  Okay, make that a hundred times or ten (or not at all).  Whether first place or second or another, Guyanese should get something straight in their noggins.  First, be honest.  Second, the internationals cannot just be embraced for their rubberstamp (good show) and their blue ribbon (peaceful and whatever).  The bad must be taken with what passes for the good.  I hear major reforms needed, and I mark that in red.  Nothing political about that color, simply an accounting convention to earmark a deficit.  Now for a couple more items that stretch patience.

Five years ago, the EU left a gift for Guyanese.  There were those 26 recommendations, eight of which were highlighted as priorities.  In June 2023, an EU follow-up team came and nodded its approval -two recommendation fully addressed, ready to roll.  One was tabulation of the votes.  Two years, why was that same blasted tabulation exercise so clouded in murk and, shall I say, magic?  Was it not sorted out, and in fine mettle?  I guess not.

Further, with 26 recommendations made 5 years ago by the EU, why is there still a crying need for major reforms in Guyana’s electoral system?  Was anything of substance, of genuine merit, done from 2020-2025?  I would quietly say no.  No need to upset people while they are having a good time, toasting the fruits of their labour.  A particular kind of labour, it was.

Time to take stock.  After 26 recommendations, there is the overlap of major reforms needed and the advantage of incumbency leading to an uneven playing field.  Somebody is messing with the mind of Guyanese.  It isn’t me.  Put them side by side: 26 recommendations and major reforms and incumbency superiority and what did Guyanese have during the most non-Yuletide of seasons?  In Guyana, that goes by the holly and mistletoe of elections.  No wonder everyone is having a wonderfully merry time.  Score a pick six for the self-helpers.

(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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• elections 2025, GHK Lall, International Election Observer Mission, Major reforms

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