The headline is not an original formulation. It is partially borrowed from the late Miles Fitzpatrick, then a columnist in the Stabroek News. He was writing just before the reforms of the early 1990s about the Elections Commission and its Chair, Sir Harold Bollers, a former Chief Justice of Guyana, in an article entitled “The Gumbie Cat.” The struggle for free and fair elections had moved beyond the confines of the PPP and its supporters, to the WPA and its supporters and then to wider civil society. A student of both poetry and Marx, among other subjects, our tragic elections history, now repeating itself sadly as farce, again depicted by the Gumbie Cat, would not have escaped Fitzpatrick, a dominant and engagingly popular force in civil society’s contribution to a democratic Guyana.
