REPRESENTATIVES of the government side on the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) have accepted that in order to ensure a speedy delivery of long-overdue Local Government Elections, the secretariat of the elections commission will examine the details of the local area authorities changed by Local Government Minister Nigel Dharamlall for a final decision by GECOM Chair, Justice (Ret’d) Claudette Singh.

In an invited comment from the Guyana Chronicle, Commissioner Sase Gunraj, moments ago, confirmed this. Commissioner Gunraj said the representatives from the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) believe strongly that the actions of the local government minister were lawful.

Minister Dharamlall’s adjustments were done after an extensive consultation process which, no doubt, utilised factors very likely to be considered by the elections secretariat in its report.

Gunraj also said the challenges from the representatives of the A Partnership for National Unity + Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) are intended to delay the holding of local government elections. With the GECOM chair’s ruling today, Chief Election Officer Vishnu Persaud will likely submit his report to the Commissioners for consideration within two weeks or “in the shortest possible time”.

If that report is favourable to changes made by Minister Dharamlall, GECOM will adopt those changes and have them gazetted.

The political opposition has challenged Minister Dharamlall’s lawful right to demarcate boundaries of local area authorities, a challenge which goes against actions taken by Dharamlall’s predecessor, Ronald Bulkan when the now political opposition was in government.

Noting that former Minister Bulkan did a terrible job when he changed the boundaries, Vice-President Dr Bharrat Jagdeo, at a recent press conference, said that the recent action by the PPP/C government corrects those mistakes. More specifically, he said where constituencies were reduced from nine to eight in one area, they were restored to nine in an area.

He said government also extended some areas so that most people who were not part of an NDC area were brought in to one. Added to that, the VP said that in Berbice where there was a collection of 25 villages in one NDC, those villages were split across two NDCs.

In a recent statement, GECOM addressed the matter, saying: “the Chairman pointed out that those changes made to the boundaries of the local authority areas, and any changes to electoral divisions within those Local Authority Areas, are within the legal authority of the Minister.

“She emphasized however, that if the Minister sought to form or change the configuration of constituencies within those areas, he would have usurped the power granted to the Commission to combine and sub-divide electoral divisions to form constituencies. If such were the case, the Minister would have acted outside of his legal remit.”