SINCE I was a student at UG, I did not respect the academic quality of Henry Jeffrey’s work. I never did. I never will. I never thought Jeffrey’s analyses meet the threshold of sound academic output. I will present one aspect of Jeffrey’s work to prove my point.

Jeffrey contends, in an article in the opposition online newspaper, Village Voice, that there was extensive fraud in the March 2020 election. He gave the following breakdown of the rigging by percentage by the opposition PPP. R stands for Region.
R1- 34.6; R2- 74.8; R3- 67.9; R4- 55.4; R5- 50.5; R6- 77.4; R7- 70.5; R9- 53.7; R10- 17. There was no percentage for Region 8. Here is a man that is supposed to be educated publishing the percentage of fraud in a general election perpetrated by the opposition party to give them victory and it did this marauding while the ruling party stood helplessly and physically paralyzed.

You feel sorry for the PNC as an opposition party when irrational and illogical presentations like these are made by people that support the opposition. Obviously, people are going to attribute those vacuous thinking to the PNC itself and the PNC loses support because of this comicality.
I believe this is what happened in the local government poll in June this year (LGE 23). Any sane person even without an ounce of formal education but who favours the PNC has to stay home whenever there is an election with the PNC contesting because the logic is absolute – if the PPP was in opposition and completely took over the election to give itself victory, then how can the PNC win any election when that very strong, omnipotent, infallible opposition in March 2020 is now more powerful because it is in government.
This thinking by PNC voters causes the PNC to hemorrhage votes at LGE 23 and it will repeat itself. One can simply imagine the emotion – “de PPP rig de thing when in opposition, now deh in government, deh gun do it again so I ain voting.”

Think of how helpless PNC voters feel when their government was in power, with the president being a former army man, his deputy being a former army man, one of the ministers in the government being the former commissioner of Police, and one of the president’s advisers being a former army chief. And to crown it all, GECOM threw out the Deputy Chief Election Officer in previous elections and put someone that the ruling party favoured.

Despite this strategic fortress of power, the opposition party, without a computerized voting system, rigged the election in 9 out of 10 regions to put themselves in power. The mystery that only Jeffrey can explain is why the opposition PPP chose not to rig in Region 8 in 2020. What was special or daunting or eerie in Region 8 that it scared the PPP from voting?
The question, of course, is how any human that once lectured at a university can come up with such a corrugated fiction? How in the history of the world, an opposition party can exercise such manipulative power over the state to give itself strategic latitude to penetrate the entire election machinery? Could the answer be that from the time the election process started, the two ruling parties – PNC and AFC- were fast asleep? When they woke up, the election was over.

But here is the greatest irony in an election process in the history of the world. These same two ruling parties that were so helpless during the election became frighteningly aggressive when they discovered they lost and fought for five months to stay in power using incredibly shameless mechanisms.
I ask in all sincerity should Henry Jeffrey be allowed by PNC supporters to speak on their behalf with what in politics and journalism we call mambo jumbo? Is there any normal human being out there that believes the percentage of rigging that he claims the PPP perpetrated on Guyana during the 2020 election?
When I read Jeffrey’s article in Village House, I can see why the court ruled against Village Voice over its copyright infringement. When I read that column my mind went back to my student days at UG in the 1970s when I frowned on the scholarship of Jeffrey. In a follow-up column, I will examine his reply to Professor Randolph Persaud in which he extols his achievements when he was a PPP minister and will ask him if other PPP ministers have not been endowed with those same achievements since August 2020.