IF Geeta Chandan-Edmond stands alone in an enlightened corner of the APNU+AFC rigmarole coalition, Christopher Jones appears to be counted among its ill-informed. A lot of crazy, laugh out loud bare-faced lies were spoken by coalition MPs during the debate over Budget 2025 in the National Assembly. However, Jones, the Chief Whip of the APNU+AFC, stole the cake when he suggested there was simply no evidence that the PNC was responsible for rigging elections in Guyana.

MPs with the party in office reminded Jones of the findings of the Commission of Inquiry (COI) into botched attempts by the APNU+AFC to steal the results of the 2020 elections. Jones, a former salesperson at Courts Furniture Company and a PNC videographer turned parliamentarian, heckled them from the comfort of his privileged seat in the assembly.

Aubrey Norton gave Jones an awkward nod of approval and a few days later, he too was telling the assembly that the PNC is proud of the fact that it restricted essential food items in 1970. This statement tells the Guyanese people that there is absolutely no separation between the PNC of today and the dismal record of the PNC 50 years ago.

Tell that to the nearly half a million Guyanese, 90 per cent of them having earned a tertiary or university education, who fled Guyana to escape the tyranny of L.F.S. Burnham and his PNC. It’s a chilling statement.

Someone should drop a copy of the Commission of Inquiry report and kindly ask Jones and his esteemed leader, Norton, to read it again. And if that’s not enough, let’s go to the 1968 elections and demonstrate how the PNC honed its grim talent in rigging that year’s election. So emboldened by its success in 1968, the party adopted the same sinister playbook in 1973, 78, 80 and 85.

Independent Television (ITV), formerly known as Granada Productions, a prominent British production company that was established in the 1950’s as a rival to the BBC, aired an investigative segment on Guyana at a time when television was not yet coloured. The segment was called “The Vanishing Voters” and the documentary focused on the results of the 1968 elections in Guyana.
Just a mere two years after Independence, the PNC had managed to pull off a remarkable feat by winning 30 of 53 seats in the National Assembly. It is true that the Americans didn’t trust Dr. Cheddi Jagan and his wife, but Indo-Guyanese adored them. How did so many Indo-Guyanese end up voting PNC? What happened? To the astute PPP activists on the ground, it didn’t add up. Something must have gone awry. The producers of “The Vanishing Voters,” with absolutely no skin in the game, set out to investigate.

Under the original version of the Representation of the People Act, overseas, postal and proxy votes were deemed permissible. The PNC saw this as a golden opportunity to register some 67,000 overseas voters, one-sixth of the entire electorate. Shockingly, “all” of them voted PNC.

According to interviews conducted by the producers of “The Vanishing Voters” with officials of the PNC government in London, there were 43,423 Guyanese residing in Britain although the official British census and immigration records showed that only 20,000 Guyanese were registered in the U.K.

Using an official list published by PNC, two dozen researchers with Granada Productions door-knocked on 550 addresses in London and “did not find a single Guyanese living at any of the addresses.” Half of the people who opened their doors had never heard of Guyana. Some addresses were builders’ yard, some were homes that had been demolished or stood vacant for years. One address was a railway station and some had been padlocked long before 1968.

The researchers went to the city of Manchester and found that a whole half of the supposed homes on the list of addresses of Guyanese did not even exist. They couldn’t find a single Guyanese at 350 addresses. A footnote for the PNC diehards like Jones, Sherod Duncan, Roysdale Ford and Norton, all of this was filmed, a testament to the best form of investigative journalism. The entire overseas vote amounted to a “massive fabrication” according to the producers of “The Vanishing Voters.”

The producers didn’t stop at Manchester. They went to Wolverhampton where the PNC published list showed 220 Guyanese voted for the party. The producers interviewed one Joe Hughes who affirmed that the official list of the Guyana High Commission showed that only 41 Guyanese resided in Wolverhampton.

There was only one conclusion – the PNC voters overseas were fake.

 Even the U.S. Embassy in Georgetown knew it and dispatched a telegram to its State Department four days before the 1973 elections. It stated:
“Rigging will be the most important additional source of PNC votes. In Guyana itself, rigging is likely to occur in postal voting, in proxy voting and by ballot box switching and stuffing.”
The Hon. Gail Teixeira, the veteran PPP MP with the most institutional political memory of anyone I know, coined an apt phrase for today’s PNC. She described them as “spoilers.” “No more 2020 experience, that is not going to happen again,”