Attorney General and Minister of Legal Affairs Anil Nandlall has argued that there are a lot of things related to the 2020 General and Regional Elections which the Alliance For Change (AFC) should apologise for.
At the party’s press conference last week, AFC Leader Nigel Hughes was asked whether he will be apologising for the events of the five-month long elections which were marred by attempts to undermine democracy.
But in response, Hughes said there is nothing to apologise for.
“I’m not sure what we would apologise for…If you’re talking about our role in elections, I would ask you to identify to me specifically what it is that you are saying the AFC did in the elections for which you are seeking an apology,” Hughes said.
During his weekly programme ‘Issues in the News’, Nandlall noted that with that kind of approach, “they will never, ever come close to the doors of Government”.
During the 2020 elections, the AFC was a member of the then coalition Government, which faced massive accusations of undermining the electoral process. For five months following the March 2 elections, the APNU+AFC Coalition employed various delay tactics, including filing multiple court cases to stall the official declaration of results, which were ultimately confirmed through a CARICOM-led national recount.
Elections observers from the Organisation of American States (OAS) in their report noted that they had “never seen a more transparent effort to alter the results of an election”.
Nandlall reminded of the various statements from the international community, noting that now, “the international community is looking, the voter is looking, the ambassadorial community is looking…and Nigel Hughes doesn’t know what went wrong and what he did wrong.”
In 2020, as the David Granger -led administration continued to hang onto power, acting Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Western Affairs of the US State Department, Michael Kozak had expressed that “the United States joins the rest of the Region refusing to go along with this farce. We will continue to act until the Granger Administration accepts the will of Guyanese voters.”
US Secretary of State at the time, Mike Pompeo, in announcing sanctions against officials complicit in undermining democracy, had stated that “the Granger Government must respect the results of democratic elections and step aside.”
Commenting on the situation at the time, the then EU Ambassador to Guyana Fernando Ponz Canto had said, “We said it very clearly: the tabulation process for Region Four was not credible, [it] was not reflecting the will of the people, it was following a process that was not the right process. I saw it personally; I was there in the tabulation centre. [But] it doesn’t really matter that I saw it personally…all our observation missions saw it.”
Meanwhile, Nandlall also lambasted Hughes for distancing himself from questions about the Statements of Poll (SOPs) that would purportedly show that the APNU+AFC coalition won the 2020 General and Regional Elections, as they had claimed.
When asked at the AFC press conference, Hughes had said “at the last election, I was not in the business of examining SOPs.”
However, Nandlall contended, “Your party is claiming that they won the elections, you wouldn’t one day ask to look at the SOP?”
He also argued that at the time, Hughes was a leader within the AFC and moreover, that his wife, Cathy Hughes, was a government minister.
The Attorney General also rejected claims from the Opposition that the charges of electoral fraud brought against several individuals are ‘trumped up’.
“You know what happened and you saw what happened…you don’t have to listen to me or the PPP. You just have to look back at the clips, that’s the beauty of technology…they’re right on your Facebook,” Nandlall noted.
Nine people including former Government Ministers and Opposition members along with former employees of the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) are before the court for electoral fraud.
The case comes up again on November 6, 2024 before Chief Magistrate Faith McGusty.
Nandlall said he hopes the case now moves with alacrity.
