A New and United Guyana presidential candidate Ralph Ramkarran yesterday rapped de facto Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo for helping to “restore PNC dictatorship” on the basis of rigged elections which he said both of them in their youth as members of the PPP had fought against.
In a Facebook post, Ramkarran was responding to a barb aimed at him by Nagamootoo in his column `My Turn’ in the state-owned Guyana Chronicle yesterday.
Not naming Ramkarran, but clearly adverting to him, Nagamootoo referred to the yet undeclared elections result and the possibility of another cycle of litigation.
“The leader of the cluster of miniscule parties that may get one seat in the National Assembly from what are commonly deemed `left-over votes’, has already pompously confronted the Carib-bean Court of Justice (CCJ) with this possibility. `We coming back right hey!’ he bawled in the face of the Court”, Nagamootoo said.
Ramkarran had urged the CCJ to make a determination as to the results at the March 2nd elections. The CCJ declined to do this in its judgment on Wednesday though it ruled as invalid the Chief Election Officer, Keith Lowenfield’s discarding of over 115,000 votes in a computation that gave an elections win to the incumbent APNU+AFC.
Referring to the quote from Nagamootoo’s column, Ramkarran said in his Facebook post: “I presume that the quotation …taken from Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo’s Sunday Chronicle article ‘My Turn’ refers to me. When I criticised the Prime Minister a week or two ago in my Conversation Tree article in the Stabroek News, I called him out by name. Why is Moses afraid to name me?”
Ramkarran said that he trusts that Nagamootoo understood what went on in court.
“He should have understood my strategy in asking for the CCJ to make a declaration as to the elections results. It is now clear that I correctly anticipated Lowenfield’s recalcitrance and insubordination by the production of false results. I expected, which now turns out to be accurate, that (in) the absence of a declaration that the recount results are the lawful results, Moses’s government, with his solid support, will continue its efforts to rig the results of the elections and remain unlawfully in office. That is why I submitted to the CCJ that we will be back there if the lawful results were not determined.
“I do have an acquaintance with court etiquette and respect, so that I have never in many decades spoken, and will never speak, in the disrespectful, colloquial, manner suggested by Moses. It is a pattern with which he is more familiar, from his APNU+AFC political platform culture, which enables him to conjure up and write such language with such facility” Ramkarran stated.
Nevertheless, he said that Nagamootoo must be congratulated for promoting shared governance in his column, even at this late stage, when his government is besieged by international opprobrium, “having been repeatedly caught trying its best to steal the elections, an effort that appears to have his full support”.
Ramkarran added: “I look out for the Prime Minister abandoning his now clearly shattered dreams of personal glory, which he hoped to attain when he abandoned his comrades in the PPP and crossed the floor, long in the offing, recognise the contempt and ‘ludicrosity’ in which he is viewed, and return to his defence of free and fair elections, 1968-1992 style, that we spent our entire youth fighting for. It is never too late to redeem oneself, including a self-proclaimed `Marxist.’ Or has that been abandoned too?”
Legacy
He questioned what legacy Nagamootoo expects to have “with his continued debasement of his once proud and courageous journalistic and political careers, which he is ending in ignominy, by helping to restore the same PNC dictatorship, subjugation and impoverishment of the Guyanese people that so much of Guyana fought against for so long and for which so many heroes gave their liberty and their lives?”
Nagamootoo restated in his column yesterday what he had proposed during 1997 – while a senior member of the PPP – could be a solution to the electoral and political crisis then.
He said that he advocated a power-sharing political solution under which, except the presidency, “everything else should be on the table for dialogue and negotiation between the government and the opposition”.
Nagamootoo added that more recently many well-meaning persons have contacted him for him to re-state his position and they have also been suggesting inter alia that:-
(a) the President and the Leader of the Opposition should urgently engage on the way forward;
(b) a multi-stakeholders National Com-mission be established to prepare for transition to a multi-party/multi-ethnic interim national government based on 50/50 parity in Cabinet;
(c) the Constitution ought to be amended to depoliticize and broaden the Elec-tions Commission;
(d) laws must be made to regulate campaign financing and foreign interference in the electoral process;
(e) personal data of all Guyanese nationals should be protected from unauthorised access and manipulation for electoral purposes;
(f) there should be a thorough revision of the voters list to weed out the names of deceased persons, and those who are living permanently in foreign countries; and
(g) fresh elections to be held under the aegis of the United Nations within three years.
Nagamootoo added that “These are by no means novel or new ideas but I share them today with a view to stimulating a national dialogue on the way forward so that we could avoid the pitfalls that would attend zero-sum, winner-takes-all elections”.
