I WOULD say 16 months before a national election is a time when people begin to talk about such an event. Our national poll is scheduled for November, but election talk has begun. As we climb to November 2025, there is the need to keep alive memories of the conspiracies that almost smothered the democratic culture in the last election cycle.

Two vicious manifestations of illegal behaviour were designed to give the APNU+AFC incumbents a colossal advantage, and if they were not confronted, politically and in the courts, I would not have been writing this piece. Both of the stratagems that are discussed below were illegal and unconstitutional. Put yourself in the place of PPP leaders who were over 60 at the time of the March 2020 elections. All those over 60 had witnessed the denial of successive PPP victories from 1968 onwards.
I was a PPP polling agent at the Saint Thomas Moore RC School in the 1968 election. I was asked to leave at the close of the poll. I refused and was put out of the building. In fact, I was roughly escorted out of the school compound. Those PPP leaders that saw the travesty of 1968 had to see it 52 years after.

As we move on to 2025, we must write about those two illegalities, and how Guyana’s apex court, the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), saved this country from extinction.
The first illegality was the assertion by President Granger that the Carter-Price GECOM formula, as incorporated in the Constitution, empowered him to submit a list of candidates for the GECOM chairmanship to the Opposition Leader. This was one of the most barefaced political acts in the history of this country.

The Constitution’s language was forcefully pellucid. The Opposition submits a list of names, and the sitting president can reject or accept. This is referred to as the Carter-Price formula. Mr. Granger turned the Carter mechanism in the opposite direction. He said he could also propose a list of names to the Opposition Leader, and he cited the ruling of the CCJ to support him.

The CCJ merely suggested that the Opposition Leader and the President should meet to discuss eligible candidates. The CCJ said absolutely nothing about the authority of the President to offer a list of names. That would have been contrary to the very ruling of the CCJ when it struck down President Granger’s arbitrary selection of Justice Patterson as GECOM’s chair, citing the constitutional article that assigns authority to the Opposition Leader to submit a list of candidates.
When it became clear to the PPP that Guyana would not have an election because President Granger was not going to accept any person from even a hundred names from the Opposition Leader, the PPP accepted a nomination from President Granger. It must be noted, for the recording of history, that the Carter methodology, as enshrined in the Constitution and conformed to by every President since 1992, was not adhered to by the incumbent government in the March 2020 election.
The second stratagem was the foolish and shameless adumbration by the incumbent APNU+AFC Government that 34 was the majority of 65. How did this come about? By some weird, psychic contortion, the adherents of the 34 argument divided 65 persons into 32-and-a-half persons and then round off the half-person.

The repugnant opportunism in that approach was two-fold. First, you can round off a mark or a percentage, but you cannot round off people. There is no half parliamentarian. The only half person I can recall was my mother’s insistence that after selling her coal (in those days people cooked with coalpots) and returning home very late in the night, she saw a half-person walking down D’Urban Street, and she ran, screaming. My mom told us that story even though we were grownup kids who didn’t believe in the supernatural.
The second dimension in the conspiracy to get 34 as a majority to stick was to apply the method of division into halves. You cannot arrive at a majority of 20 or 30 or 40. But the method of using halves is irrelevant, because 65 is an odd number.

It remains a mystery today why the proponents of the 34-majority magic arrogated to themselves the right to divide 65. There was no need for a division, because 65 is an odd number, and with an odd number, a majority figure is easy to arrive at; easier than kissing the palm of your hand. You could have seen on the faces of the CCJ judges that they found the acceptance of 34 as a majority of 65 as being a rib-tickling joke.
DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.