Editorial

All around us, the world is slowing down because of the coronavirus.

As the world is compelled to slow down for a few weeks or a couple of months, as the current pandemic makes hay, and as the days of the lockdown evolve into nights, the older folks might dust off the beloved turntable and unpack their hibernating long play vinyl records (LPs).

The March 2 general elections and the protracted political spillover serve as, among other things, a poignant reminder   that we may be closer than we think to    exhausting our options for determining for ourselves the way we live, before fate and our folly remove from us the prerogative of exercising that choice.

As Chair of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh has a pivotal role in ensuring that elections supervised by that body are conducted in a manner that accords with best practices and yields a free, fair and verifiable result.

We live in troubled times. The outcome of the election which took place on March 2 should have been clear and accepted by all parties a few days later.

Our collective jeopardy, by a pandemic or anything else, offers us the chance to reimagine the world; to consider how we might change the present and avert similar threats and mistakes in the future.

There are some things in life that are so preposterous they seem beyond belief.

The World Health Organisation has called the coronavirus, COVID-19, “the defining global health crisis of our time” and indeed it is.

On Monday, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister announced that Canada was closing its borders to non-Canadian citizens, with limited exceptions, as of 12.01 am  EDT, on the 18th March, in the hope of restricting the spread of COVID-19.

Towards the end of last week, after it had been announced that a Guyanese woman who had traveled home from the  United States  and shortly afterwards had become the country’s first coronavirus fatality, the national mood underwent a perceptible shift.

On Wednesday the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. From that point onward every country ought to have focused on what epidemiologists call “flattening the curve” of infection rates – to prevent a surge of cases overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Iran.

Rationality has supervened in the matter of the Region Four election count at last, courtesy of Barbados Prime Minister and CARICOM Chair Mia Mottley.

Given the outpouring of revulsion yesterday from the Western countries and local and international observer groups about the deceptions unremittingly employed by Returning Officer for Region Four Clairmont Mingo in his second attempt at tabulation, there is no more space for denial of the fact that the March 2 general elections are being rigged before our eyes and in the crudest way.

A new factor has entered into Guyana’s complicated equation, and this one in a sense comes from left field. 

Every five years, many Guyanese don red and black or green (now green and yellow) shades that do not allow them to see anything objectively.

The recent blockades of railway lines across Canada by the Wet’suwet’en, a First Nations group, have attracted the world’s attention whilst shining the spotlight on Indigenous peoples’ self-determination and land rights, climate change and the oil and gas industries. 

Notwithstanding an all-out price war this week between Saudi Arabia and Russia that can see oil prices fall persistently below Guyana’s production cost, it is fast approaching five years since our eternal dream of lifting ourselves out of what the Jamaican Economist George Beckford termed ‘Persistent Poverty’  reached the crest of not just a mere wave but a tsunami.

After a week which has threatened the integrity of our national elections, many of us should now have a clearer sense of potential flashpoints in America’s ongoing primaries and its forthcoming elections.

(Editor’s note:  Below we reprint the editorial that should have appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek.

The conclusion that certain members of Gecom were involved in manipulating the Region Four results cannot be avoided.