Burnham was a fella who wore his learning on his sleeve: he never lost an opportunity to show that he was the brightest lamp in the room – bulbs weren’t very common!! One of his ploys was to drop schoolboy Latin aphorisms crammed at Queen’s into his political harangues – at rallies of unlettered supporters. Your Eyewitness is reminded of one of the arcane bon mots in the war of attrition conducted over the past months to select a new GECOM Chair: the distinction between casus belli and causa belli. There is, he’d explain with a smirk to his adoring audience, the difference between the OCCASION for the war and the CAUSE of the war.
And so it is, the selection of the GECOM Chair wasn’t the CAUSE of the war that was waged, since the cream of the Secretariats staff – CEO Lowenfield, DCEO Myers and Reg 4 RO Mingo, Information Technology Officer Enrique Livan, and Clerks Michelle Miller, Sheffern February and Denise Bob-Cummings – were charged for fraud in the March 2 elections fiasco and were hauled before the courts. Nah…that was simply one of the OCCASIONS for the war.
The war in Guyana’s been going on since the 1960s. And the fundamental CAUSE for this war is the refusal of the PNC to accept the rules of democracy to determine who’d govern Guyana. Democracy, after all, allows the majority of the people in the country to decide “who rules”. But the PNC have already decided from the beginning that only THEY should rule!! In their political playbook, “democracy” is just a label to present to the rest of the world that’s finally formed a consensus that the rules of democracy trump all other forms of governance.
As such, it doesn’t matter what issue we’re discussing in Guyanese politics. If the PNC’s involved, know they’re subverting democracy! Free and fair elections, where every vote should be counted? It took 28 years for them to even accept that PRINCIPLE!! And only because of pressure from the established democracies.
Unsurprisingly, they’ve been trying every which way ever since to subvert it since then!!
And we arrive at Vishnu Persaud being chosen as the new GECOM CEO. We’ve got to view the process that the PNC are now complaining bitterly about from the vantage point of the previous GECOM fiasco. The one caused by the unilaterally Granger-appointed Chair James Patterson nixing Persaud over Myers as the DCEO in 2018. Persaud had been the incumbent DCEO since 2015!! Patterson, of course, was later adjudged to’ve been illegally appointed by Granger, and had also libelled Persaud over the latter’s qualifications.
As Burnham would’ve said, “F?at j?stitia ruat cælum” – “Let justice be done even though the heavens fall!!
…yet protested
Your Eyewitness was surprised that immediately following GECOM Chair Claudette Singh’s announcement that Vishnu Persaud was the new GECOM CEO, the three PNC Commissioners launched a bitter denunciation of her. He’d expected the LOO, Joseph Harmon’s! Seems that of the two candidates left standing, the PNC Commishioners chose the Jamaican, and the PPP the Guyanese. It came down to the Chair’s casting vote.
We gotta remember that because it was foreseen that the Commissioners would most likely split down the middle in following their party’s line – AGREEMENT between the PPP and the PNC on who’d be the Chair was constitutionally mandated. And Claudette Singh was actually the PNC’s preferred candidate!! But what should’ve placated the PNC brigade was that Justice Singh revealed that she was heavily influenced by the recommendation of Persaud by her predecessor Steve Surujbally.
The latter had been heartily cussed out by the PPP for their 2015 loss!! Surely that should suggest he’s not a PPP sleeper now activated to recommend Persaud!!
…for human rights
Friday was International Human Rights Day. One of those rights enshrined by the UN is the right to choose one’s Government. So why are the PNC allowed to get away with defending the rigging of elections??
