…shame on who??
If somebody had written about what’s going on in Guyana today as a piece of fiction, we’d all have said, “Gwan da side!!” Not about what the PNC’s doing off the scene stirring up their supporters into hysterical tirades on everyone or every country that dares to point out the folly of their ways. That’s expected…the PNC will be the PNC – it’s hard wired??
Nah. What your Eyewitness is scratching his head about is the behaviours of two fellas who would’ve been seen as “senior civil servants” not so long ago – Mingo and Lowenfield. They’re the local equivalent of those stiff-upper-lip types who the British routinely sent out to manage us natives in the Empire on which the sun never set. Cuffy staged a rebellion for us to replace them…so did Damon and all the slaves on the East Coast in 1823…and those indentured servants who faced their “leaden persuasion”. Let’s not even mention Jagan and Burnham!!
And this is what we struggled for?? Mingo blatantly adding votes for the PNC and taking away for the PPP in front of the entire free world? Lowenfield twice refusing to follow the clear and direct orders of the Highest Court of the Land to total up 10 Certificates of Recount to determine the winner of the elections?? And in effect sticking his middle finger at the Chair of GECOM, who’s a retired Justice of the Appellate Court, to boot?? This is the democracy and freedom we fought to enjoy over hundreds of years??
Mingo and Lowenfield have proven everything the colonial powers said about us is true. That we were not ready to govern ourselves. With the political types like the PNC, they always admitted there would always be incorrigible bandits who could accede to power. Wasn’t Warren Hastings impeached for his depredations in India?? But the Civil Service was the backbone of the Empire…they would stand true when all was crumbling around them.
Lowenfield and Mingo were trained in the bureaucratic minutiae of delivering free and fair elections. As with all good bureaucratese, the instructions were spelled out to the “T” so that everything would be beyond reproach. But here it is, these two men succumbed to the very infirmity the British insisted we were congenitally incapable of overcoming: venality!
The failure of these two men to do what is right for the country is a failure arising out of the PNC’s corruption of the Bureaucracy after Burnham cut that deal with the British in 1964.
Did he think the British had any respect for him after his betrayal??
Do his successors like Lowenfield care??
…is one too many
Justice Claudette Singh determined the fate of hundreds who passed through her courts as she worked her way up the judicial ladder. Your Eyewitness knows that in her position, she was trained to give all the parties the benefit of the doubt and apply the law to the facts presented to her so that justice would be served. Justice, after all, was supposed to be blind, to ensure impartiality.
It’s clear that this orientation has become deeply ingrained in her. And we see it in her dealing with the clear intransigence of Lowenfield, who’s an employee of the Commission – in which she has the casting vote. He has twice defied her clear instructions – which were defined by the CCJ, our apex court. But she has refused to follow the unanimous advice of the international and domestic institutions that have been following the PNC’s labyrinthine manoeuvrings – to fire Lowenfield and get on with it.
This matter, after all, doesn’t just affect hundreds – but the lives of the entire Guyanese population.
Three strikes and Lowenfield should be out!!
…but then what??
Your Eyewitness can’t pretend he wasn’t kerfuffled when he read that the Iron Lady would substitute the DCEO, Roxanne Myers, if Lowenfield balks the third time??
Does she really think Myers isn’t cut from the same cloth??
