THE Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) is primarily concerned with the preparation, ensuring, and management of the nation’s electoral process. It is therefore a constitutional body, which gives it a central role in the State’s democratic process. It is because of its being the pivot in its key role of ensuring the will of the people that its process is always under scrutiny with much comment/concerns about its functions, and suggestions for improved functioning.

But despite many criticisms about its functions over the decades, GECOM has been able to deliver national and regional election results, endorsed by international observers, thus allaying any doubts/fears about its credibility as a constitutional oversight body, and the transparency of the electoral process. And this is emphasised, although there still remains the question as to the late delivery of official results and two incidents in 2006 and 2011, where the former Chief Elections Officer had made major blunders.

It is against this background that the recent attacks on this constitutional body, by one of its commissioners that had been nominated by the political opposition party, alleging racial imbalance with the racial composition of its staff has raised eyebrows. It is the kind that calls into question the integrity of the Chairman and his stewardship of GECOM; and, as would be expected, the latter quite correctly demanded a substantiation of the commissioner’s accusation.

This accusation we find very suspicious, not only because it has had its genesis in a Freedom House Independence lecture series, at which the commissioner had first made such a claim, that he has also extended to the entire public service; but also, that it resurfaced at an important GECOM meeting that had been convened to finalise arrangements with regards the important Local Government Elections (LGE) due in the latter part of the year.

From the smell of it, it is the usual continuation of the dishonest narrative of racial discrimination against Indo-Guyanese, peddled by the Peoples Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C, since being defeated at the May 2015 polls. It is also the kind of accusation, subtly clothed in statements that attempts to whip up dangerous sentiments against an institution which function is crucial to the exercise of the peoples will, and by extension the coalition–led administration of President David Granger.

At best, such statements as they relate to the electoral body, are very surprising; but they are very devious, highly mischievous and misleading in content, given the fact that it is the same staffing composition of GECOM that has been integral in guiding the electoral processes that oversaw the many PPP/C victories at every poll, before 2011 and 2015.

We must again underline this salient fact: That GECOM and its appointed commissioners are constitutional office holders and are therefore not expected to be partisan. They and the senior electoral staff especially, are all referees in a process and are expected to deliver free and fair elections, and not act in, a partisan, dishonest and undemocratic manner as what had been the shocking example by a former CEO in the tabulation of the 2011 results.

We see no other reason than attempting to bring the electoral body into disrepute, by placing it in a head-on collision with PPP/C constituents. How egregious and sinister can such self-serving and deliberate anti-national ploy be, at a time when efforts are being made to affect a better understanding of each other as Guyanese, despite our diversity and whatever our political affiliation.

Further, the commissioner’s statement and its timing, that is, is called into question, especially at a juncture when another important, national electoral exercise is being planned, albeit at the local government level. If it is intended by such unsubstantiated accusation, at best loaded with ill intentions such as creating doubts in the minds of constituents, so as to derail the electoral process at the local level – it will not succeed.

In fact, the commissioner and his party are best reminded that local government in a free and democratic mould, with people and their communities deciding what is in their best interests with no political interference, is here to stay. It is a process, commenced in 2016, which can only redound to the benefit of all the communities across Guyana.