We live in troubled times. The outcome of the election which took place on March 2 should have been clear and accepted by all parties a few days later. Yet here we are, three weeks on, with no credible official results declared for Region Four, and by extension, therefore, no official result for the general election. And now we are faced with another court case relating to the recounting of votes which begins tomorrow. No one is sure quite how long that will last, considering the court will have to deal with the preliminaries first.
Misfortunes, it seems, do not come in singles, and if the aftermath of the elections were not enough, we also have the coronavirus to contend with. Exactly how the two will interact is not easy to predict, although if the number of COVID-19 cases increases substantially in circumstances where election issues have not been resolved, then owing to the isolation requirements and the like which might have to be instituted, there could be further, even potentially extensive delays. Needless to say, the consequences of that hardly bear thinking about, and therefore it is essential a recount begins as soon as possible.
Tabulating a result from the statements of poll is an exercise in simple arithmetic which any primary school child would recognise. So either it is that certain of our GECOM officials have serious problems with numeracy, or they have malicious intent and did not intend to count the SoP results in the standard way. Everyone knows which of the two applies. It is for that reason that President David Granger’s near silence in the first phase of this absurd drama is inexplicable, and while he has been making statements since the departure of the CARICOM team, these too raise more questions than they answer.
His standard position has been that the executive cannot interfere with the work of an autonomous body like GECOM. While that is true, he contested the election as the leader of a political party, not as President of Guyana. When, therefore, Ms Volda Lawrence in her capacity as Chair of the PNCR (not as a minister of government) signed the bogus declaration of results on March 5, was it with Mr Granger’s approval? As leader of his party was he not consulted on the matter? Whatever the answer to that question, it does him no credit. And if he had concerns about the non-credible results, why did he allow Mr Joseph Harmon to talk so cavalierly to the media about him being sworn in if the judge discharged the injunction against the ‘declaration’, as Mr Harmon seemed to think would happen?
Was it that Mr Granger was indeed prepared to be sworn in on the basis of results which had been condemned by all the other parties, by overseas election observers, by local election observers and by foreign diplomats? Did he have not even a soupçon of unease that he would become head of state on the basis of a fraudulent poll? And is he seriously going to tell us that he trusts GECOM to deliver results when several members of that organisation are compromised, to say the least, and Mr Clairmont Mingo has been engaged in illegalities perpetrated not secretively, but publicly, and which now have produced two sham outcomes?
Most extraordinary of all, President Granger appeared singularly unperturbed by the fact that the two fake declarations made by Mr Mingo produced different results, and that in the case of the second, there were some polling stations which had more votes than they had registered voters. Is it that he sets no store by honesty and integrity? Yet, there he is once again in his latest statement on Friday telling the public to respect the role of GECOM, and to desist from attacks on the chairperson, the commissioners and members of the commission. “The Elections Commission has the sole authority for the conduct of General and Regional elections and must be allowed to function independent of political interference, instruction and influence,” he said. He went on to tell the public that he had pledged to respect the Constitution and protect the integrity of the chairman and members of the elections commission, and would obey the rulings of the court. He expressed himself confident that once GECOM and the courts were “allowed to function without interference, [they] will provide a solution to the present situation.”
At this stage in the proceedings, this is enough to leave any reasonable citizen breathless, more especially as he went on to remark, “I have maintained that the electoral process must be credible.” The implied contradiction between this and his earlier statements appears to have escaped him entirely, particularly when officials like Mr Clairmont Mingo, for whom integrity is an alien concept, are taken into account. Could it really be true that he is committed to defending that gentleman’s integrity?
There is too the matter of the CARICOM delegation which had come to undertake the recount, and which had been forced to depart after Ms Ulita Grace Moore had secured an injunction from the High Court. What President Granger omitted to mention in his statement about how he regretted that departure, was that Ms Moore was none other than an APNU candidate for Region Four in the March 2 election. How does he expect anyone to give him credibility when the only possibilities are either that he didn’t know about it, in which case he is really not running his party, or that he did know about it and did nothing. If the latter, then why he did nothing will be critical to an understanding of his true mindset.
All of this familiar patter from the president comes in a context where the ballot boxes have been moved from the Arthur Chung Convention Centre to GECOM HQ. It is true that six of the contesting parties had issued a joint statement in which they had lamented the fact that the container with the Region Six ballot boxes and the one with the Region Four East Coast boxes were not stored at the convention centre in Liliendaal along with all the others, and had requested that they be stored at a central location. This request related to facilitating their security. The problem is that the removal was done without any notice being given to the parties, and as we reported yesterday, questions directed to GECOM about it were met with silence. Furthermore, it was unclear what provisions had been made which would reassure political parties about the security of the containers.
Given what has happened, the parties other than APNU+AFC are naturally concerned about the possibility that there could be tampering with the boxes, and the longer a recount delay drags on, the more likely that becomes. All that can be said is that it would not help the cause of the perpetrators, since any significant discrepancies between the ballots and authorised copies of the SoPs, will also invalidate the election. In other words, Mr Granger cannot be recognised as a legitimate president and function as such if the shenanigans in whatever form continue.
At this stage, he should stop mouthing his usual platitudes and take action – action, that is, against the extremists in his own party determined to derail a genuine recount of votes. He should make clear to them he is not prepared to be sworn in on the basis of a fraudulent tabulation or recount, involving the rigging of ballots or any other method. Since they are clearly operating in conjunction with officials at GECOM, if they abandon their plans, there would be no point in discredited members of the Secretariat pursuing their nefarious schemes any longer. As for the commissioners appointed by the governing party, if the extremists were being reined in, it would surely occur to them that a credible recount as soon as possible was the best route forward.
Court decisions will not on their own guarantee a credible process, since as we have already seen from what transpired after the Chief Justice issued her ruling on March 11 and 13, elements in GECOM cannot be trusted. To repeat, in order for us to emerge from this morass, President Granger in his capacity as leader of APNU and the PNCR needs to act against those in his party who seek a fraudulent outcome for the election, and chaos for the country. Up till now, he has sought to project an image of distancing himself from what has been going on. He has failed, because no one is persuaded. At this late stage, he has only one option, and his place in history depends on whether he takes it.
