-thoughts on PPP’s warning and GECOM’s assurance…

IT HAS been a long time since a major party in Guyana opted to go public with the serious claim of “electoral padding” of the Preliminary List of Electors (PLE) compiled by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) for new national elections.

But precisely such an allegation was made in a media statement last week by the General Secretary of the governing People’s Progressive Party (PPP, Mr. Clement Rohee.
Also current high profile Minister of Home Affairs, Rohee went further with a promise to make available to GECOM the relevant information obtained on “electoral padding” with the expectation that the problem would be speedily and seriously addressed by the Commission.
Well, as is widely known, under the Peoples National Congress (PNC) long reign of state power-based on documented evidence of rigged national elections-allegations of “electoral padding” for national elections was the norm that made a mockery of electoral democracy.
It is, therefore, quite encouraging to learn, via GECOM’s Deputy Chief Elections Officer, Vishnu Persaud, that while the Commission has good reasons to say the current Preliminary List of Electors was “safe” (meaning, I assume, free of political skullduggery), it would await the promised report of specific problems referenced by the PPP’s General Secretary.
I am reasonably familiar with the functioning of the seven-member Commission–an independent constitutional body. I think I also know something of the particular competence and integrity of its chairman, Dr Steve Surujablly, in addition to a few of the commissioners, of the PPP and PNC.
According to media reports out of Georgetown there appears to be some tension in current relations between the administration of President Donald Ramotar and the Commission’s chairman.
Assuming the accuracy of such reports, it is to be hoped that both would correct this impression following the release of the approved preliminary list of verified electors.
The people of Guyana cannot afford ANY brand of political rascality that smacks of governance based on rigged elections. And the PNC’s activists of Region 10 who were also delegates at the party’s 18th biennial congress cannot now be a party to any kind of electoral fraud.

Barbados/T&T politics
Meanwhile, hilarious or worrying as they may be for those directly involved, the reality is that multi-party politicking continues to dominate public life in these Caribbean Community states. And surprises, painful and otherwise, are guaranteed.
Hence in Barbados, a former dynamic leader and three-term Prime Minister can walk away from the party of which he has been a member for 43 unbroken years with a public pledge “never to return.”
In this regard, mark one for Mr. Owen Arthur, a respected economist and former articulate crusader for the Caribbean Community as an economic integration movement.
Across in neighbouring Trinidad and Tobago, Mr. Winston Dookeran, an economist and former Central Bank Governor, currently Foreign Minister in the cabinet of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, is burdened with his own political disenchantment.
Having voted, as he said he would, against the Constitution (Amendment) Bill 2014 in the House of Representatives last Wednesday, he may well have decided to demonstrate more of an independent position between now and new general elections by June next year, and not later than September.
A founder-leader of the Congress of Peoples (COP), which secured six seats at the last general election for the 41-member House of Representatives, comfortably dominated by the United National Congress of Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, Dookeran, once a key representative of the UNC had broken ranks to form the COP ahead of the 2010 general elections.
The Constitution Amendment Bill, otherwise viewed as a path-setting legislation to enhance parliamentary democracy, includes the right to recall parliamentarians as well as term limits for Prime Ministers. It also provides for so-called “run-off” polls when contestants fail to secure more than 50 percent of the valid votes in any constituency.
Ironically,  while Dookeran voted against the bill, his successor as COP leader, Prakash Ramadhar, lawyer by profession, remains quite firm in his support, even as Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar, had publicly declared that all government MPs were “free” to vote as they choose and so they overwhelmingly did.
The Senate is scheduled to meet on August 26 when the focus of attention would be on the voting by six independent senators. The indication points to approval, as happened in the elected House of Representatives.

BLP “lost its way”?
Meanwhile, former Prime Minister Arthur, who resigned last month from the Barbados Labour Party, with which he had cut his political teeth. He did so amid then prevailing wide protests against the government’s controversial Solid Waste Tax (as reported on earlier in this column).
Arthur’s stunning claim to rationalise his departure from the BLP-one of CARICOM’s oldest parties-was that it “has lost its way and has lost its soul…”
What a startling indictment—the validity of which is yet to be clearly articulated-by Arthur, the politician who now sits on the front-bench in parliament slightly apart from government MPs in the House of Assembly. Among those MPs are ones who have been chorusing their ridicule of Arthur as both Prime Minister and Opposition Leader.
Question of relevance being raised, and not just by faithful members of the BLP-one of the oldest parties of the Caribbean-but others of divergent political affiliations as well.
That painful question is whether it is Mr. Arthur-former dynamic party leader and three-term Prime Minister who may really “have lost his way”-by his dramatic “walk away” from the party with which he had spent 43 of his 64 years?
In our CARICOM Region a few other major parties have been varyingly affected by leadership problems, some resulting in splits and creation of new parties. Examples would most decidedly include Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Jamaica, Dominica, Grenada and St. Lucia.

(Analysis by Rickey Singh)