Part 1: Seen and known by all before polling day!
By Earl Bousquet
THE small-islander in me waited-up Monday night until very late, searching the ‘Net’ for results of the day’s historic Local Government Elections (LGE).
Not that I had any illusion the PPP/C would win, only that the journalist in the islander is accustomed to getting elections results in Caribbean Community (CARICOM) nations on the same night, most time before midnight.
But with no answers to my calls and no figures published up to 10:30pm, Che Guevara’s maxim of ‘constant vigilance and mistrust’ flashed across the revolutionary in my memory and I (almost) started thinking something could be wrong – like some form of extra-parliamentary intervention or something that had either brought counting to a stop, or prevented it from getting started.
Rather than subject myself to the nocturnal rigours of trying to wonder what went wrong, I told myself it was better to let sleep take me away and awake later to see what the final figure was.
After two hours, I got up and quickly checked (without putting lights on) for ‘missed calls’ or new WhatsApp or email messages, but there was none, so I consulted Mr Google again — and there it was, results were being reported.
But my eyes saw something strange: one was saying the opposition was doing better than expected, another was of the Elections officials urging all parties and political interests to ‘accept the results’ and a third offered preliminary results with the PPP/C in the lead.
I thought of hitting the sack again for another couple hours, but in reading-up on a feature about previous LGEs in Guyana since 1992, I noticed the PPP/C claimed victory in most and actually won two, with that of 2020 buried in the cacophony of electoral misadventures that attended that year’s Presidential and Regional elections.
But in the corner of my eye I noticed that the Elections Commission had ‘up to five days’ to declare final results – and that jolted me off my toilet seat into the reality that the islander in me had totally forgotten to take into consideration Guyana’s sheer size of 83,000 square miles and the fact that (like with India) it takes long lengths of time for voting results to be transported or transferred to Georgetown from the closer coastal and faraway riverain, forested and mountainous interior regions, towns, villages and Amerindian areas where Guyanese cast their ballots every five years.
That awakening settled all of me into another mood and I changed mode into getting ready to resume my column in full (after an unusually-longer recovery period following a four-island, three-airline, 14-hour overnight trip – to Jamaica and back in one week, on assignment).
I’d decided though, to ride the last week out in recovery mode while observing the campaign trends in the Chronicle and other local media.
Like I said, after the five-month 2020 electoral hijack I felt certain the PPP/C would win whatever next elections came first (LGE or Presidential) and the current administration’s performance since August 2020 had long convinced me the ruling party would win, hands down.
The trends had already solidified my assurance — and then I saw Freddie Kissoon’s article with a headline saying he’ll vote PPP/C and I told myself, never mind the gander (or propaganda), the opposition’s goose was surely cooked. Why? Because Freddie has said before that he’s never voted PPP/C after Cheddi Jagan died, even when he started having problems with the alliance he supported.
So, to see that headline over an article by Freddie, I simply starred it for later reading and started thinking of how to start approaching coverage of the 2023 LGE results before they were announced – an impossible task bordering on baseless speculation in the absence of facts, as far as the journalist in me is concerned.
Yesterday, I noted that while the elections were largely peaceful and successful (by observers’ accounts also published online), the PPP/C Leader, ex-President Bharrat Jagdeo, was appealing to supporters (and Guyanese generally) to await the final results from the elections commission, as there had been ‘false news’ projections published online by the usual political and media suspects.
But all in all, he said, the PPP/C (by its own count) had satisfactorily eclipsed the Opposition, in areas traditionally dominated by the latter and from which there was a noticeably large outflow of supporters who crossed the electoral floor during the campaign, and, on Election Day, voted with and for red-shirted slates in many cases swollen by many long-time prominent former opposition members, as well as more recent candidates and LGE officials.
By mid-morning breakfast-for-lunch (Brunch) on Monday, I was able to replace the earlier evening’s mistaken anxieties with the maturity of patient expectation with equal traditional anxiety that comes from historical experiences of covering elections in Guyana from 1980 to 1992, between then and 2020 – and this week’s 2023 LGEs from a long distance.
I’ve always held that Free and Fair elections in Guyana should best be measures according to which party or parties appoint the Elections Commission to oversee the poll – and that in a country where a party leader, Prime Minister and Executive President famously suggested that any ruling party that loses office deserves to.
The 2020 electoral heist by the then ruling alliance has not served it well, the electoral marriage of convenience suffering a quick divorce two years later and obviously affecting its ability to stay united and – most important – convince traditional supporters it’s worth their votes in 2023.
How well the opposition did or how bad it scored in the court of the local voting public’s opinion or in the global public square will take some time, as per usual (and despite technological enhancements).
But in the meantime, I also continue to wonder just how good the PPP/C did.
Time will soon tell! (ends)
