THERE is a major difference between vice and virtue that not all politicians understand, as the definitions and interpretation will differ according to time and context. But there’s nothing virtuous about approaching politics with only vice in mind — and calling or treating it as virtue.

Efforts by the People’s National Congress (PNC) and the Alliance For Change (AFC) to take a virtuous approach to the muddied and muddled ‘VICE’ interview with Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo is nothing but laughable, but it’s also a serious reflection of how easily the two parties will together mix vice and virtue as one, with the singular common objective of being politically victorious without victory.

Nothing in the VICE interview with the Vice-President revealed anything near to what the APNU+AFC band did while in office between 2015 and 2020; or, for that matter, between 1964 and 1992, when the PNC committed the most vile political atrocities ever levelled at any party in Guyana’s history.

The PNC under Forbes Burnham made it an often-repeated vice of cheating and stealing elections – and the APNU+AFC tried to do likewise after the March 2, 2020 elections, holding on to lost power for all of five long and bitter months in defiance of the expressed will of the electorate, even claiming – without providing a scintilla of proof – that it had won and was somehow cheated out of office.

They even claimed to have “evidence” in Statements of Poll that have remained invisible to this day, more than two years later. Vice-President Jagdeo recently publicly challenged PNC Leader Aubrey Norton to produce the said statements, but they have remained totally invisible and unavailable, mere figments of collective opposition imagination.

There is only vice and simply no virtue in the calls by the PNC and AFC, together and separately, for Vice-President Jagdeo to resign over the ‘vice’ interview, when neither party, nor its supporters in the media, or those who simply latch on to calls for him to go, have been able to prove in any way any truth in their claims that Dr Jagdeo did anything wrong, as charged by those with only partisan political vice in mind.

President Dr Irfaan Ali; Prime Minister, Brigadier (Ret’d) Mark Phillips and Vice-President Jagdeo have, in the past 27 months since the 2020 elections the APNU+AFC tried for five months to steal a free-and-fair election they lost, been presiding over a new Guyana with the resources that were also available for preparation and consideration under the previous administration since 2015.

That the defeated partnership alliance has been unable to provide a single unit of proof of their loud claims is a louder statement in itself, but even louder than that is the collective expressed and demonstrated statements by the USA, UK, Canada and all the countries and entities that stood by the fairness of the process and made it clear to those wishing to steal the election results that their vice would not be forcefully accepted as a virtue.

The PPP/C administration has taken necessary steps to ensure a Commission of Inquiry will sit on the elections and the PNC and AFC will have yet another opportunity to prove their claims that the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and all others who distinguished between vice and virtue on the matter were simply lying.

But until the two losing parties can honestly select between political and electoral vice and the virtue of honesty, they should allow Guyana to continue to grow as it has been doing since they were voted out, without vice — and in full virtue!