Dear Editor,
We are on the eve of a momentous declaration regarding the “mother of all elections”, the declaration of the “results” of the March 2020 elections. Today is June 16, more than three months after the elections in which winners are normally declared within a day or two.
Let us be clear about one matter. This is indeed the “mother of all elections” for one singular reason. At stake is the stewardship of trillions of dollars of oil money.
We have witnessed a painstaking process that has revealed the depths of depravity to which a regime would sink, in order to hold on to power, as a means to have their hands on the oil dollars. If the APNU+AFC succeeds in its attempt to rig the elections, it will rank as the greatest financial heist of all times. The goal here is to transform trillions of dollars of state resources into private property and the emergence of a new ruling class, with real tangible wealth not dependent on political power. A genuine ruling class must be able to control political power by virtue of its economic wealth, as was done in the developed countries.
It is ironic that an important player in the midst of the electoral confusion is the distinguished professor, Dr. Clive Y. Thomas. He is the political economist who identified the process of how political power is transformed into economic wealth in Third World countries. Kwame Nkrumah presaged the process when he waxed biblical, claiming to “seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things will be added unto you”, or words to that effect.
The process Dr. Thomas described was a “historically necessary process”, that of class formation. With independence, one ruling class is replaced by an emerging ruling class. In Guyana, the Burnhamist state seized control of the commanding heights of the economy, by nationalization. When confronted by the IMF, President Burnham “chose to die” rather than dismantle his state capitalist “feudal” estate. His ego could not stand the emotional trauma of dismantling his power base.
The Hoyte regime began to dismantle the Burnhamist state, as dictated to, by the IMF. Hoyte reopened the economy, but at a terrible price to working people in the most dramatic manner. The currency skyrocketed from 25:1 to 125:1. The remittances from abroad rescued Guyanese from destitution.
The Jagan regime continued the Hoyte project, but it was the Jagdeo regime that was able to “capitalize” on the economic level. The Pradoville project was symptomatic of the fact that the devil wears Prada, as he ground his heels into the flesh of Guyana. Drug dealing and private death squads ran rampant in Guyana.
The discovery of oil fundamentally changed the equation over the past decade, turning the 2020 elections into a trillion dollars Quest for the Prize.
In Third World countries, the objective process of the “historical necessary class formation” takes the form of corruption, at the subjective level. The grab for the oil dollars as manifested in the electoral process, is simply who gets their hands on the money, by right of the political power to dispense contracts to “friends and families”. “Follow the money”, is the best guide to understanding why the elections are the epicentre of one of the most dramatic and absurd events in Guyana’s history, where everything has been turned upside down.
It is noteworthy that Dr. Thomas is the de facto leader of the Working People’s Alliance (WPA), which is an integral part of the government. On June 13, in honour of the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Walter Rodney, Dr. Thomas focus’ was on Rodney’s relevance to the electoral struggle of 2020. Rodney died in the struggle for free and fair elections on the eve of the 1980 elections.
The WPA supported the call for the recount as agreed with CARICOM. With the recount finished, and the numbers in favour of the PPP/C having won the elections, we are now confronted with the added wrinkle of a claim of the elections as being fundamentally flawed, and the numerical results should be rejected. The “war cry” is to “smash the ballot box”. The modified version is to claim that it is the PPP that commandeered the electoral process, making the results null and void.
Dr. Thomas’s WPA has a vote on the Elections Commission in Desmond Trotman, and his vote is very important in deciding the results of the elections. The question is how is the will of the WPA to be manifested in Trotman’s decision to cast his vote. This singular vote will decide the fate of the WPA, as an entity in its own right. It faces a decision that can potentially wipe out its forty years of existence or reinstate it as an independent political force.
My recommendation to the WPA is to accept the numerical results of the original completed count which gave the PPP/C the victory. To subvert the will of the people with another fifty shades of gray argument about the 2020 elections is a measure of how screwed up we really are. We really do not want to go down that rabbit hole.
Yours faithfully,
Rohit Kanhai
