…on the GECOM Chair
No…your Eyewitness isn’t getting biblical and all that. He’s NOT referring to that jawbone which Samson used to slaughter thousands and thousands of Philistines!! He has in mind the now seemingly interminable process of talking, negotiating, bargaining, dickering, thrashing out, haggling – or in other words, “jawboning” – to select the next GECOM Chair. Seems caretaker President Granger has deigned to meet the Opposition leader today…or maybe not!
And that’s the farce to which the affairs of this country have been reduced by the caretaker. We can’t even get a clear confirmation of a meeting on a matter that’s has fixated the entire country!! And we have to know that when something like this happens, there’s more in the mortar than the pestle. Not that the pestle ain’t hefty!!
Let’s face it…it shouldn’t be so difficult to find the head of an essentially administrative department, should it? Elections are held practically every week of the year in one country or another around the world, and their citizens don’t have to go through this rigmarole. In India, for instance, the person is chosen from the higher echelons of their civil service. What makes us different?
And the simple answer is that for over two decades, the PNC blatantly, flagrantly and obscenely rigged our elections to remove the most fundamental right of us as citizens – the democratic right to choose our Government. And the rigging started with appointing a Chairman who held the casting vote in our Elections Commission so “any number could play” – once it was a PNC number!!
Not surprisingly, the 28-year abused Opposition parties by 1990 focused on “free and fair elections” starting with a Chairman who wasn’t in the pocket of the Government. With jawboning by President Carter, the formula in Art 162 (2) was agreed that: the OPPOSITION LEADER would submit a list of six persons not unacceptable to the President, who’d then choose one. The formula worked from then to now. And what’s different now? The PNC’s knows its 1-seat majority is gone, that’s what!!
Granger then decided that Guyana should return to the old days of Burnham handpicking the Chairman to stack the deck. Nobody Jagdeo picks satisfies him – even a former GECOM Chair and an ex-army comrade to boot – who the PNC had proffered! So the question arises: why would Granger demand his own Chair? And you’d have to be completely daft to think this is just a pissing contest!!
Granger is adamant that the PNC should not be removed from office – with all that oil money in the offing. And so he believes he can jawbone Jagdeo into getting his own man.
Jagdeo should pull a Sampson on him for his effrontery!!
…H2H need
The narrative the PNC’s pushing for is insisting a new list be compiled from a new H2H exercise because the PPP’s got some 200,000 dead persons on the present list who they’ll resurrect and have them vote for the cup!! Well, at least hand out the ID cards of the dead and bring persons who’re such splitting images even the PNC scrutineers at the polling booth won’t be able to detect the fraud!!
Another angle is even if the PPP doesn’t have 200,000 extra bodies to shift around, they’ll hand out the cards to folks who’ll vote on multiple occasions in the four or five polling booths that are customarily located in one compound and have the same voting lists posted. But what about the ink used to stain the finger at every booth??
Well..duh! The PNC says the PPP distributes a solution that miraculously and instantaneously removes the stain!!
Wouldn’t it be smarter to market the solution and knock Tide off their feet?!!
…PPP’s inexplicable losses
Your Eyewitness has a question that’s been troubling him. If, as the PNC insists, the PPP had the capability to rig elections by the above stratagems and more, how come they lost in 2011 and 2015??
Were they tired of ruling??
