Part 3: The figures behind the numbers
By Earl Bousquet
PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo is brilliant with figures and numbers, with glaring proof across Guyana and visible to anyone heading to and from the City of Georgetown from the Cheddi Jagan International Airport at Timehri.
A former Finance Minister, he’s also a twice-successively-elected Executive President of the Republic, who succeeded Presidents Cheddi and Janet Jagan before falling victim to the two-term limit introduced to shorten presidential reign – and avoid Opposition-generated election-related violence around the last presidential polls of the 20th Century.

And now he occupies the General Secretary’s chair at Freedom House, headquarters of Guyana’s Mother of All Parties.
So, as I watched the PPP’s fastest-rising leader on Tuesday morning sharing the numbers his party’s 26,000 election workers had tabulated country-wide overnight, I knew I could very well count on his every word.

From the figures, he expects the PPP/Civic to win 62 of the 80 Local Government areas, with four tied, but with majority votes in each case, he also expects, according to established convention, his party will eventually chair 66 assemblies.
On the other hand, he said, the Opposition, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU), should win about 14 assemblies, but losing nine outright.

By their count, PPP/Civic won in seven towns: Mabaruma, Anna Regina, Rose Hall, Corriverton, Lethem, Bartica and Mahdia; and in New Amsterdam — a traditional PNC-APNU stronghold — the PPP/Civic won three and APNU won four, where APNU won 11 and the PPP/Civic only three in 2018, but expects to win eight seats and APNU six in 2023.
The PPP Leader — more than once — paid tribute to the role of Afro-Guyanese in his party’s outright victory, citing “our neck-and-neck result in New Amsterdam” as “an advance due to the former APNU supporters who took a chance and joined us…”
He said they “waged a very good and positive campaign…” despite being “vilified personally,” women among them accused of “prostituting” themselves.

But the accountant in Jagdeo also backed his words with figures: “In 2018, we had 470 votes in New Amsterdam and in 2023 we have 1,784 –1,314 more in 2023 than in 2018 — a 270 per cent increase — and we now have an equal number of seats with major inroads in that APNU stronghold.”
In the City of Georgetown, which the PNC has dominated for six decades, the PPP/Civic won five of 15 constituencies — up from three in 2018.
In one constituency transcending two PNC strongholds (Cummings Lodge and Sophia), he reported, “only four votes” separated the parties “and with 150 rejected ballots we’ve requested a recount, because of a large number of spoilt votes…”
Offering more numbers to figuratively explain the PPP/Civic’s performance in Georgetown, Jagdeo said: “In 2018, the PPP/C got 6,813 votes in Georgetown and in 2023 we’ve tabulated 12, 256 – nearly double the amount” winning nearly 6,000 more votes in the City, including in several traditionally PNC “garrison” areas — and by over 500 votes in Sophia and Albouystown, East and West Ruimveldt, where the PPP traditionally won as little as 20 votes.

Waving the PPP’s figures to the gathered press, General Secretary Jagdeo said, “They will not go through these figures with you, because they are hoping to drown-out the massive increases we’ve won in the City by clouding it with rhetoric, noise and lies…”
However, he insisted, “The votes tell the story, which is a definition of our success in the City.”
In Linden – another traditional APNU-PNC stronghold – he said the PPP/Civic also increased its support, from only 402 votes in 2018 to 2,464 in 2023 – a 512 per cent increase.

And in what he referred to as “a reflection of change”, the PPP Leader reported his party also won in traditional PNC towns of Bartica and Mahdia.
According to Jagdeo, “The PPP/C won bigger in traditional areas and made significant inroads in all new areas we won – and that’s the reality they’ve trying to hide from the country…”
He then switched mode, condemning the opposition’s victory claims the night before.
“On Election Day,” he recalled, “we saw the vilest campaign, with subliminal racist messages trying to drive fear into people — and which we hope ERC (Ethnic Relations Committee) will pursue…”

He also said pro-Opposition Social Media activists were targetting City voters “with rumors about removing vendors and taking their land and houses, to be sold to big business…”
“But in spite of all of that,” he maintained, “they failed to stop the Red Wave because it was real!”
He also recalled that “Less than 12 hours after the polls closed,” the PNC was raising “concerns” about “delay in announcing results” and “talking about “transparency”.
The PPP Leader predicted that Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton won’t likely have a soft landing after the APNU and PNC’s turbulent Election Night flight.

He said, “Norton will see the hyenas come after him now, as they’ve been harping at his feet for some time…”
Jagdeo’s statistical overlay figuratively underlined his emphasis on the enormity of the PPP/Civic’s 2023 victory, coming less than three years after the electoral hijack of the 2020 Presidential ballot that saw the losing APNU-AFC coalition illegally hold-on to power for five long months, until reluctantly submitting to a ruling on their illegality by the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ).
But perhaps the PPP Leader’s most deadly illustration of his party’s electoral slaughter of the Opposition was in this explanation from Corriverton:

“A PPP/C candidate passed away in Corriverton and could not be replaced before elections, so I said earlier that the APNU will win, but they didn’t, as the dead candidate still got 333 votes and the APNU candidate got 160…”
“People still voted for a dead candidate to prove a point: Even a living APNU one was rejected in favour of a dead PPP/Civic, because they did not want APNU’s negative policies affecting their community.”
Indeed, the facts and figures truly backed his numbers! (end)