Dear Editor,

MR. Enrico Woolford has offered a response to my letter on the subject of the recent Guyana Press Association elections in which he writes that Kit Nascimento “has decided to go into his toolkit to tinker with the Guyana Press Association and declare what should or should not obtain”. What exactly he means remains unclear throughout his long letter, but it is reasonable to conclude that it is intended to be disparaging.

In fact, from all that Woolford writes, we are both very much on the same page, when he concludes that the Association “must remain resolute to ensure that any attempt/subterfuge to undermine its credibility/operations is soundly and utterly discredited and abandoned”. I have said, for instance, that “it remains essential that the Guyana Press Association should recover and restore its credibility in order to fulfill its responsibility to represent the voice and concerns of a free media”.

I part company completely with Mr. Woolford in that it is the Press Association itself which has caused the controversy over the way it has conducted its elections and sought to defend it by refusing to publish the list of its members deemed to be eligible to vote until the actual elections, bringing the credibility of the entire election into question.

It is unheard of to conduct a free and fair election, without revealing for public scrutiny, the voters’ list. Ruel Johnson, writing on the same subject, has so aptly put it; “if there were a country which Government conducted a long overdue election in which a small group of incumbents illegally changed voting regulations and produce an inscrutable voters list which not only returned those people to power, but put in place a President whose reelected tenure is bound to surpass constitutionally bound term limits, who was up for yet another term after the renewed incumbency, and who had sole legal control of the Treasury, that country would not fulfill even the minimum governance requirements of a functional democracy”. This exactly describes what the GPA has done.

The GPA’s four-person Executive, when constitutionally five are required for a quorum, have, in fact, violated their own constitution in conducting the elections and have brought the controversy down upon their own heads.

The GPA has:

1. Refused to publish a list of members deemed to be eligible to vote. While it has been the GPA’s practice to allow registration and payment of membership fees up to the day of elections, it was never the practice to confine this to exclusively on the day of elections, excluding any possibility of prior scrutiny or challenge of the list.

2. Conducted elections without having audited accounts.

3. Conducted their last elections in 2018, five and a half years ago. Ms. Raghubir sat as President for those five and a half years. She is, however, restricted to serving three continuous terms in office, leaving six (6) months at the time she ran for elections. She is now allowed to serve for another four years, which will add up to some nine and a half years. Is she, therefore, prepared to resign in six months and call another election?

It is precisely, therefore, because of the importance of the Press Association remaining a credible voice of a free press that I have called upon Ms. Raghubir and those elected with her to put right what has clearly gone wrong.

Yours sincerely,
Kit Nascimento