Dear editor
ANIL Nandlall recently wrote that “It is a fundamental prerequisite that staff at GECOM reflect the face of the Guyanese constituency.” On a general level this is quite right, as it would for instance be quite strange if only Amerindians worked there, but when you take this argument too far it lapses into the ludicrous and certainly tells us a great deal about how the PPP/C sees elections locally.

Issues of national importance? Long-term national development? No, this is not how the PPP/C thinks about elections in Guyana. For them, it’s all about race — the good lawyer even had the audacity to say openly that anyone who doesn’t think voting is based on race in Guyana should be ignored.

So, if you think voting in Guyana has anything to do with the country’s communist and socialist past, or with its colonial history, you must be mad. If Mr. Nandlall is to be believed, then you are born a racist and will die a racist, since no one has had any genuine ideological belief throughout our history. He must surely think the split between Burnham and Jagan was purely racial, and that no external forces were involved.
Obviously Mr. Nandlall is not acquainted with Guyana’s history, or at least chooses to ignore it for his own reasons. What is important is that we can clearly see that race is the way the senior leadership of the PPP/C thinks. It is no wonder, if this is the case, that allegations about race-based discrimination were rife during their time in office. This even lends credence to allegations of race-based statements made by the leader of the opposition while on the campaign trail.

The long and short of this is that Afro-Guyanese make up 46% of GECOM staff, according to its senior leadership, an easily verifiable statistic. Shouting at the top of their lungs, as PPP/C representatives have been doing on this issue just points Guyanese to the race-based way the PPP/C really thinks about the nation; and it is this revelation which is, frankly, the real headline here.

Regards
Earl Hamilton