Dear Editor

BY now, Guyanese who understand the dishonest politics of the PPP/C would have seen through its deception and what it is all about; this is with reference to the current High Court hearing, in which the opposition party is challenging the constitutionality of house-to-house registration.

Editor, PPP/C attorney Anil Nandlall argues “… that the house-to-house registration exercise undertaken by the Guyana Elections Commission is illegal, because it is intended to scrap the now expired List of Electors, and replace it with a new one generated from the nationwide exercise. According to him, in doing that, persons would be de-registered.”
It is clear that Nandlall is either “trying a thing” or is downright dishonest, since he is seeking to make illegal a national procedure that is catered for by law, supported by the National Registration Act, 19:08. In other words, it is catered for in the nation’s electoral laws. In fact, he is reminded that he is contradicting a Holy Grail principle of PPP/C electoral politics, fought for by the founder of the party that he now represents in court. Just how he reconciles such a contradiction, perhaps, is best known by him.

Of course, he is correct in saying that the national registration exercise is intended to cause the scrapping of the expired list, and having it replaced with a new one, except that his reasons for saying so, is deeply flawed.

Certainly, such is the purpose of a new round of national enumeration, to replace an expired list, with a sanitised one, reflecting the new status quo or realities of the statistical evidence of the current national demographics.

Further, in any new exercise, which will reflect the new realities, there will be de-registration, which Nandlall claims will affect citizens. This is another piece of nonsense offered, and the reasons should be quite clear to all.

First, there has to be de-registration of persons whose names would have been on the expired list, and may have died, or migrated since, or during the life of such a list.
Second, I stand to be corrected by referring to an obligation on the part of the chief immigration officer who is obligated to inform the chief election officer/commissioner of national registration, of those persons absent from Guyana for more than six months and for their names to be removed from the National Register of Registrants. Included in this category of missing persons, will also be Guyanese citizens who migrated, but who would have also died while being resident overseas. Both these categories in themselves are absurdities, particularly the latter for their names to still be on a list. So, it can be safely concluded that absent citizens, both through migration and death, were never intended to still be on a list of registrants after a period of their absence, whether through death or otherwise absent. It is only a periodic exercise of the nature of house-to-house registration that can/will correct such electoral abnormalities.

Regards
Carla Mendonca