Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago Dr Keith Rowley yesterday expressed disappointment and concern at the ongoing delay in executing a credible tabulating of the votes cast in Guyana’s March 2 general and regional elections.
“I am getting a feeling that this is not going to end well…I hope I am wrong but that feeling…I am not having a good feeling…I have this unsettling feeling [that grows] with every passing day,” he said last Friday.
Speaking in an interview with journalist Elizabeth Williams, Rowley said he was deeply concerned and worried that a month after polling, the elections have become a “court house matter” and Caribbean Community (CARICOM) leaders, who sought to assist by sharing the benefit of their experience and the comfort of their presence, have been vilified.
Nine days after the March 2 elections, a team of CARICOM leaders, including Rowley, visited Guyana in an attempt to mediate in the elections crisis. The team met with leaders of the 11 parties which contested the elections and facilitated meetings between President David Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo.
Their visit followed a legal challenge to a declaration of results made by Region Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo, which had been deemed “fraudulent” by opposition parties. This declaration was later vitiated by Chief Justice Roxane George.
Two days later, Mingo made another declaration which was also labelled fraudulent and President Granger reached out to CARICOM for a team to supervise a recount of votes cast. Included in the team was the Chief Elections Officer of Trinidad and Tobago Fern Narcis-Scope.
This recount never happened as a candidate of the Granger-led coalition, Ulita Moore, applied for and received injunctions against its execution. Those injunctions have since been discharged and the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has once agreed to have a full national recount. It is, however, not clear how this process will be executed including whether or not CARICOM will be involved.
Speaking as Prime Minister and according to him, as a Caribbean person, Rowley said he was hopeful that the involvement of CARICOM would have brought a satisfactory end to the process but now that the community has essential become a “defendant in the court,” he was unsure what position CARICOM holds.
“We thought we had an agreement from the leadership to abide by the recount…they said send us a team of scrutineers…the next thing we knew was that presence of CARICOM, by invitation, became accusations against CARICOM and a legal challenge so we had to get out of there,” he said, adding that now that the community was basically a defendant in the court, he was not sure where it stood.
He stressed that the prolonged process is not helpful to Guyana nor CARICOM.
“Nobody is going to benefit from this in Guyana,” he maintained before adding that with the CARICOM headquarters located in Guyana, there is too much at stake for CARICOM.
“We can’t accept a situation where in the headquarter country what is being threatened comes to pass,” he stated.
Guyana has been threatened with economic sanctions from various countries including the United States if a government were to be sworn in based on results which were “not credible.”
