Henry Jeffrey

‘Constitutions are seldom made by the will of men. Time makes them.

From the moment GECOM called on the police to investigate allegations of migrants and dead persons voting, I saw three possible outcomes to the current elections dispute: (1) the evidence presented to the Commission did not taint the majority of votes in the boxes going to the party that won the majority, so the PPP/C has won; (2) the Commission finds it impossible to declare a winner given the weight of the ‘evidence’, so the elections are annulled, and (3) having been able to separate tainted from untainted ballots, the majority in the boxes cannot be sustained, so the Coalition has won.

‘The Zimbabwe case of Chamisa v Mnangagwa seems to suggest that as a general rule, an election will not be annulled if a breach of the law did not affect the election result.

When most Guyanese agreed to participate in the recent elections, they were made to understand that it was ‘impossible’ for persons to vote for migrants who were out of the country on elections day and for those who have died.

‘Even if pre-election and election day processes go well, a flawed vote count or vote tabulation can fatally undermine the integrity and credibility of the electoral process and decrease public confidence and public acceptance of the results’ (Carter Center Disappointed Not to Be Able to Return to Guyana.

So long as our two large ethnic parties are able to manipulate elections to win over 50% of the votes, even the limited improvement in political accountability our kinds of societies can gain from developing into multiethnic societies, where governments arise out of ethnic group compromise, is lost.

Over the last week of the recount process, APNU+AFC has published a document claiming that the March 2020 elections process has been marred by  ‘clear and unmistakable patterns of irregularities, discrepancies and worse’, e.g.

The last time the West placed sanctions upon Guyana, contrary to what some of its contemporary supporters say, the PNC regime caved and set the stage for Desmond Hoyte’s more free market approach.

No doubt with an eye on winning political support, during the 2005 flood, the PPP/C government deployed some of its political personnel to deliver food hampers etc.,

‘The consensual principle of democracy is in several ways the opposite to the majoritarian vision and emphasizes that the political institutions should encourage, in the extreme, mandate the inclusion of as many political per spectives as possible.

In his address to the nation after the 1964 elections, which brought his People’s National Congress (PNC) to government in coalition with the United Force, Forbes Burnham made an impassioned presentation about race/ethnicity in Guyana.

It must be obvious to the vast majority of the Guyanese that if the coalition government had won the 2020 elections, the festivities would have been substantial, long over, the PPP/C left to lick its wounds, and given the weakness of the health system, the national focus, would have been – as it should be – exclusively on the coronavirus crisis. 

Basdeo Panday, former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, came to the funeral of Cheddi Jagan in 1997, and I was delegated to chaperone him.

Last Saturday, 21st March 2020, the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) made a statement to the press that suggests that after seven decades at the helm of politics and government in Guyana, it has learnt very little.

A friend of mine told me that I was out of touch with the national mood: ‘people voted and they want to know who won’.

It has recently taken another life and I will not lift the smallest finger to help to prolong the present winner-takes-all political system of governance, matters not who will rule!

The results of the current national and regional elections have already confirmed that anyone who believes that regime change will in itself set Guyana on the path to ethnic unity and development are deluding themselves.

On 16 November 2011,  I said, “Of the major parties, I am left with A Partnership for National Unity, which has adumbrated a position that comes closest to my demands. 

The prime ministerial candidate of the PPP/C for the 2020 elections, Brigadier Mark Phillips (ret.)

A few columns ago I set myself the task of combining historical facts with personal reflections to support a hypothesis that a ‘significant shift has taken place in the global political system that threatens the PNC’s take no prisoners approach to acquiring and holding on to political power!’