Dear Editor,
In today’s Stabroek News we see FITUG and Ramesh Dookhoo of the Private Sector Commission calling for Election Day to be declared a holiday. This is clearly an attempt by Mr Dookhoo to deny the opposition parties access to transportation for their supporters to vote as happened 2006. It is informative that the Private Sector Commission is calling for this holiday with FITUG, a known PPP supporting trade union organisation. We are already in possession of information that several known contractors are marking their trucks, which will have the name of the contractor obscured, to be made available to transport PPP voters on Election Day. This is a violation of the Representation of the People’s Act since these trucks will not be paid for by the voters but by the party transporting them.
If there is a public holiday on November 28, who will transport the opposition voters who can turn up to vote at one place where their name is supposed to be, but are then told that their name was moved to some other place. This happened in Region 3 in the 2006 election, where I was working for the One Guyana component of the PNCR, and I personally saw that with no minibuses operating many opposition party voters were deprived of their right to exercise their franchise. GECOM has presided over one of the most flawed elections this country has ever seen; the PPP is paying out the taxpayers’ money as if it is water, and they are giving out house lots also as if they are water; when exactly will GECOM do something to stop this?
The opposition must object in the strongest terms possible to Election Day being declared a public holiday, and we must do so quickly and decisively. Mr Dookhoo must stay out of a matter which could be prejudicial to the opposition, lest he shows his biases, since because this call has been made along with a union organisation known to be aligned with the PPP one is hard pressed not to conclude that the Private Sector Commission too is a PPP-inclined organisation.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
