The following is an opinion piece by Kit Nascimento
On May 17, 2020, at a press conference across the road from the Convention Centre, where the Election Recount is coming to a conclusion, David Granger was asked, “To what extent would your Coalition accept the result coming from the Recount?”
He evaded the question. His answer was, “Whatever declaration is made by the Chairman of the Elections Commission would be regarded as legitimate by the Coalition Government”.
When David Granger was pressed further on an earlier declaration by Basil Williams and Roysdale Forde — that the Recount is illegal – again he stated, this time emphatically, “As President of Guyana and Leader of the Government, it is my policy that any declaration coming from the Chairman of GECOM will be accepted by the Government of Guyana”.
But David Granger’s party, on June 3, in an e-mail, declared that APNU+AFC would not accept the result of the ballot recount, a statement which we must presume has the approval of David Granger, even before the Chairman of the Elections Commission can deliver her Commission’s verdict on the ballot recount.
If, as she should, the GECOM Chairman declares the result of the ballot recount to be that which the world can already see, the PPP/C has won the Elections, David Granger’s party have now told her in advance that they will not accept any such decision.
In fact, the APNU+AFC have gone further in stating that “any results emanating from this process cannot be considered credible because of the high incidence of fraud”, thereby rejecting the entire recount process. It therefore immediately becomes incumbent on Granger to either reject the APNU+AFC statement, or be seen to have lied to the nation.
But David Granger has other problems. Not once but twice, prior even to the Recount beginning, and based entirely on the fraudulent Lowenfield Report from the Mingo tabulation, David Granger told his party followers that APNU+AFC had won the Elections. The ballot recount has proved already that he lied to his followers.
It is already patently clear that none of the so-called anomalies listed by APNU+AFC has any credibility, and remain not only unsubstantiated, but proved to be false. For instance, the ridiculous claim that absentee persons from Guyana were impersonated and voted. These persons were in fact in Guyana.
The claim by Aubrey Norton that the members of the Defence Force have been disenfranchised has also been proved to be entirely false.
As for these so-called anomalies every day being claimed at the recount stations by APNU+AFC party agents, these amount to minor infractions that have no bearing on the overwhelming result of an election process which all of the international observers found credible, and to which Granger himself originally gave his blessings.
It is time, as I have said before, for David Granger to do the honourable thing: accept that he has lost the elections and concede before he is ultimately forced to do so by the international condemnation which will come his way and to our country if he doesn’t.
