MEMORY loss is an unhealthy human condition, as is insomnia. But induced forgetfulness and willful insomnia can always be invoked to choose what to forget and remember, as is forever the case with the opposition People’s National Congress/Reform (PNC/R).

Choosing to forget its sculpted contributions to Guyana’s long, sad history of rigged and stolen elections and other democratic expressions of people’s will, the PNC/R has, too many times, been accused and found guilty of almost habitually altering voters’ decisions whenever in charge of the national election machinery.

Whether presidential, parliamentary or local government polls, the PNC/R has a long and shameful history of suppressing the expressed will of the people: from ballot boxes walking-out of polling stations with soldiers after a Local Government Election and ‘Overseas Votes’ from a house lot occupied by grazing horses in the UK in the 1970s, to rigging a referendum in the 80s, to five months of brazen theft of an entire election in 2020.

With such a background and storehouses of proof of exposed efforts and actions to bend election results, with the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and all election observers in 2020 attesting to the unbelievability of electoral memorialising details, adjusting facts and displaying election figures on bedsheets, denying living voters their rights to vote while complaining about allegedly dead electors on lists — and doing everything unthinkable to change results, the PNC/R should have long learned to keep quiet on elections issues. But instead, it’s been resorting to use of useless claims — like having Statements of Poll indicating they won, which remain invisible over two years later.

Every PNC/R Opposition Leader has had equal chances to show slate on elections issues and from the founder leader to the latest lost leader, all have failed to show a pass card, all also failing to use the law and the Constitution to score political points they cannot win at the polls.

Never mind recent rulings by the nation’s highest courts that ought to have encouraged the Opposition Leader’s legal advisers to rethink (or for him to rethink their results value), Mr Aubrey Norton is again calling on the government to recklessly take his calculatedly misleading advice to break the law and violate the Constitution, by interfering with the registered list of electors.

PPP General-Secretary and Vice-President, Bharrat Jagdeo, on Friday, demolished (yet again) Mr Norton’s shallow, baseless and utterly ridiculous claim that the ruling PPP/C isn’t ready for Local Government Elections – something his party would have been expected to be glad about (if true) and therefore feel encouraged enough to challenge the authorities to call the poll earlier than later.

Dr Jagdeo, a two-term President twice selected and elected by the majority over the best the PNC-R could have put up in two successive elections free and fair and free from fear, has thus far not only assured the PNC/R Leader that the PPP/C is as ready as ever to face the electorate, but will also be just as ready whenever the Elections Commission gives the go-ahead, this year or next.

Obviously, the PNC/R is still smarting from its largely self-inflicted wounds after losing a Confidence Vote in Parliament while still in office in December 2021, theft of the 2020 poll and the dismantling of all its legal and judicial arguments to justify electoral theft between March and August 2020, after illegally occupying State and government offices for five long and grueling months. Unfortunately for Guyana, the Opposition Leader and his party continue to show how unprepared they are for any role, not even in opposition in today’s One-Guyana, far less in government.