A civil society grouping yesterday said President David Granger’s deferring of the responsibility to the Guyana Elections Com-mission (GECOM) for the naming of an elections date is unacceptable.
The Civil Society Forum which includes the Private Sector Commission, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches and the Guyana Human Rights Association, said in a statement “Giving GECOM effective power to determine when elections will be held is a position for which no constitutional support exists. Moreover, this maneuver revives the misgivings and insecurities generated by the controversial selection of the current Chair of a polarized GECOM who now has the casting vote on when elections will be held.”
It added that the constitution mandates GECOM to be ready within ninety days and there is no provision that allows the President to alter that provision as a pretext for not announcing a date for national elections.
Adverting to press reports of Granger’s meeting with GECOM on Friday last, the grouping said that the decision on when elections should be held has now effectively been passed to GECOM. President Granger is quoted as saying,”we did not receive the sort of guidance that we need to enable me as President to make a proclamation to actually announce a date”.
The statement from the civil society groups said that giving GECOM effective power to determine when elections will be held is a position for which no Constitutional support exists.
It said that making GECOM the final arbiter of when elections can be held was made more explicit by the statement that “I am confident that if the Guyana Elections Commission resolved or reconciled the different points of view, which exist in the Commission now, Guyanese could look forward to having elections at an early date as possible”.
Yesterday, the Guyana Trades Union Congress said that as an original member of the Civil Society Forum it was dissociating itself from the statement.
The civil society groups said that rather than identify the specific technical or administrative tasks whose ‘unreadiness’ is inhibiting announcement of a date for elections, the President cited ‘unreadiness’ in the disagreements among GECOM Commissioners. This, they said, was made clear when the President spelt out the tasks as “going back to the drawing board to examine how quickly and how easily they could arrive at a consensual position; merge the various approaches; and ensure that the preparations for elections, which have already started”.
The civil society groups said that since GECOM is made up of persons chosen by the two major parties, consigning a problem that the two party leaders cannot resolve to their “selected acolytes” in GECOM seems intended more to evade than resolve the issue.
The civil society groups said that Guyanese citizens deserve better. They noted that the main preparatory tasks for elections are routine: preparing the Voters List, arranging polling stations, training staff, printing ballot papers and administering polling day. They added that all of these technical issues are the responsibility of the Chief Election Officer rather than resting on the opinions of the Commissioners.
“Given the not-too-distant local elections, GECOM is more prepared than normal. The only task around which ‘unprepared’ is ever raised is the Voters’ List”, the civil society groups said.
“In light of the role fake Voters Lists have played historically in Guyana, we cannot belittle their importance, but we need to keep our fears in proportion. The manner in which the 1968, 1973, 1980 and 1985 elections were blighted by manipulated voters list left a generation of politically aware Guyanese scarred by the memories. The pinnacle of that experience was discovering that two ‘overseas voters ‘at an address in Manchester UK were in fact two horses in a field.
“However, those excesses effectively ended when President (Desmond) Hoyte, bowing to the combined pressure of the civic movement GUARD and a number of other organisations and individuals as well as international opinion led by President Jimmy Carter, courageously postponed the 1990 elections and ordered a new Voters List to be prepared. The Voters List as a central problem of Guyanese elections has never since merited the same obsessive concern. While vigilance about a clean List is important, we have to be equally vigilant about political manipulation of historical memories”, the civil society groups said.
They noted that President Granger singled out the need to ‘sanitize the ‘bloated’ Voters List as a particularly vital factor the Commission needs to address. The civil society groups said that he noted that “we don’t want any citizen to feel disenfranchised. However, the reality is that a ‘bloated list’ does not disenfranchise individual citizens, since unregistered persons can find their way to one of hundreds of GECOM offices around the country as part of the continuous registration process GECOM conducts on a daily basis. The main problem of a ‘bloated list’ is it retains names of dead or migrated persons and to this extent artificially lowers the ‘turn-out’ percentages. The argument for a house-to-house renovation of the List, therefore, is that it is desirable, but it is not essential, given continuous registration. As a basis for setting aside the constitutional provision to hold elections in 90 days invoking the need for house-house registration, therefore, is unacceptable. Moreover, notwithstanding the decision to renovate the Voters List every seven years, neither of the major parties took steps to ensure this was undertaken and cannot credibly invoke the need to do so now”.
For these reasons, the Civil Society Forum says it believes that deferring the exercise of Presidential responsibility to set the date for elections to such time as GECOM determines its own readiness is unacceptable.
“The constitution mandates GECOM to be ready within ninety days and there is no provision that allows the President to amend that provision as a pretext for not announcing a date for national elections”, the statement said.
The subscribers to the statement were:
The Anglican Church of Guyana
Guyana Human Rights Association
Movement Against Parking Meter
Inter-Religious Organization
Guyana Presbyterian Church
Roman Catholic Church
Transparency Institute of Guyana Incorporated
Guyana Rastafarian Community
Guyana Agricultural and General Workers Union
Private Sector Commission
Red Thread
Aircraft Owners Association of Guyana
RISE Guyana
GECOM is to meet again today and there will likely be a discussion on finding common ground on the holding of elections. The government side has been advocating for house-to-house registration which could see elections deferred until next year. The opposition-appointed representatives on GECOM are pressing for April 30 as the outside date for general elections.
If there is no agreement for extension of the three-month period for the staging of elections, the APNU+AFC government faces the risk of being declared illegal.
