Beware the person who cries the loudest

By Adam Harris
I SPENT my childhood in some of the best communities. I lived at La Jalousie and Den Amstel, West Demerara, before I settled in the community of my birth, Beterverwagting, East Coast Demerara. In each of these communities, I witnessed many things.

Adam Harris

I remember returning from a shop in Beterverwagting when a man ran past me shouting “Thief. Thief.” Behind him was a crowd shouting the same thing. It wasn’t until a member of the crowd told me that the man who ran past was the thief who was ensuring his escape.

The thief managed to escape because he first made noise. No one attempted to hold him.
I was on a radio programme with Enrico Woolford, Gordon Moseley and Mikhail Rodrigues, who most people know as Critic, when I recalled the fleeing thief. The topic on that programme was the election. Critic introduced the word ‘rig.’ In his book, the coalition was attempting to rig the election.

I queried his conclusion. I contended that he was merely parroting something that one of the political parties, and some selected observers, were claiming. And this claim was endemic since every member of the political opposition kept repeating that the late Forbes Burnham had rigged elections on Guyana. That mantra never changed although Burnham has been dead for thirty-five years.

When Jimmy Carter came ahead of the 1992 elections, the cry was that the People’s National Congress was preparing to rig the elections. So it was that counting at the place of poll became a part of the elections process. Further, there was a new Guyana Elections Commission that was intended to be in place for elections that were held in 1992.

For all the talk of Burnham rigging elections in the past, I do not believe that Guyana should have been proud of those elections in 1992. They were rigged. Using a simple method, the controllers simply disenfranchised thousands of Government supporters. There was the official list of electors, copies of which were posted outside the polling stations.
A voter would check the list and would see his or her name.

However, on entering the polling place, though, the voter would find that his or her name was not on the list in the presence of the presiding officer. In Georgetown, thousands were disenfranchised. The Chairman of the Guyana Elections Commission was Rudy Collins. He had the full support of the United States Ambassador, the late George Fleming Jones, who was said to have been working closely with Jimmy Carter.

The fact that separate lists were printed could only be considered a sophisticated mode of rigging. But rigging was not pronounced on. Guyana later heard that it had returned to democracy.

Every other election in the country was rigged but no one made that claim in the media. There were the phantom votes and multiple voting but no one checked the ballot boxes. Those who made accusations of rigging were deemed sore losers. And so life continued in Guyana until March 2, 2020. In the wake of those elections, Mikhail Rodrigues and some others accused the coalition of rigging the polls. The recount resulted from those claims.

I remember Enrico, in the wake of the rigging accusation, saying that he who shouts about rigging the loudest may very well be the chief rigger. And the Political opposition was really screaming.

Some people crawled out of the woodwork to add their voices to the wail. They zeroed on what has become known as the Mingo count. Some who were supposed to be neutral suddenly shed their neutrality and clamoured for the recount to be limited to Region Four.
One observer actually wrote a letter to the Chairperson of the Guyana Elections Commission to proclaim that there were no problems with the other regions. The recount has found otherwise.

When I was active in the church I learnt about the resurrection. The priest always spoke of the grand awakening; when the dead would be caught up because the graves would open.
I didn’t understand. I simply pictured a host of decayed people rising from the bowels` of the earth. And in my quiet moments, I pitied those who were cremated. There would be no rising up for them. Unfortunate for people like me, no date was given for the dead vacating their graves. I did not know that this would happen on March 2, 2020.

Hundreds of dead people voted. It had to be a bacchanal because people were suddenly reunited with their dead relatives. But they kept the reunion a secret. The recount exposed this secret.

Perhaps, the prophesy of the dead coming back to life, if only for a brief moment, prevented any claim of electoral rigging. From my vantage point, I wondered why Burnham and Janet Jagan did not come to the party. Papa Cheddi was cremated so he could not have had an awakening.

When the announcement was made that observations of electoral fraud would be made, some people in the opposition, especially the lawyers like Anil Nandlall and Sase Gunraj, remembered that such claims should be proceeded with through an elections petition. Similarly, when the declaration was made on March 13, the objections should have been proceeded with by way of an elections petition. Instead, the vocal opposition decided to shun that option. That was why the recount came about.

So, some people want to apply the rules when it suits them and shun the very rules when they find it convenient. In addition to the reawakening of the dead, there was magic, the likes of which would have made David Copperfield look like a novice. People voted from their homes overseas. One can understand a vote by proxy, but actually marking a ballot from overseas and placing that ballot in a box in Guyana was a feat par excellence.

The discovery of these strange happenings has not been seen as rigging. Instead, there have been debates about whether the Guyana Elections Commission has the power to investigate the strange happenings. People have threatened to go to court. There have even been attempts to dry up the source of death certificates. One lawyer, Glenn Hanoman wrote a letter to the Registrar General asking that the person withhold any further release. This must be an attempt to cover up a crime.

Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo, in his usual brusque manner, promised to jail all those who provided information and documents that led to the conclusion of dead people voting and foreign-based Guyanese casting their ballot. I would have thought that he would have called for an investigation among his party ranks into the wrongdoing. Rather, he seems to be condoning it.

And to my surprise, the issue of the dead and foreign-based Guyanese is not as big as Clairmont Mingo’s declaration. It is not worthy of media coverage. The bottom line is that there has been a steady mobilization of opposition, sometimes at great financial cost to the mobiliser, to the coalition government.

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