DEAR Lincoln Lewis, if you are going to keep insisting, like a broken record, that GECOM adopts biometrics in order to eliminate electoral fraud, then, for heaven’s sake, stop copying and pasting text from artificial intelligence apps and passing it off as your own!

If you want an authentic election process, perhaps it’s a good idea to start with being honest. And shame on Demerara Wave and Village Voice for allowing an activist and a champion of labour rights in Guyana to publish articles in his name when it should be obvious to an editor with a gram of skill that they were written by an AI.

What gets me every time is the irony of an opposition that can’t seem to muster an iota of original thought, but wants to school the nation on ethics and morality. Last Sunday, Lewis published yet another article on biometrics in Village Voice, a mouthpiece of the PNC. This time, he used Ghana as an example of a nation that adopted biometrics in the space of six weeks ahead of its 2012 elections. The entire article was an AI hack job.

Lewis failed to tell Guyanese that many Ghanians— there are about 34 million of them— were not convinced when all was said and done, that the 2012 election was fair or even credible. Adopting a biometric system that used fingerprint recognition did help eliminate duplicate registrants, but what Lewis omitted was the glaring fact that Ghana outsourced its voter registration process to Superlock Technologies Limited (STL), an Israeli company. That’s not all.

The Electoral Commission of Ghana (ECG) further outsourced the biometric verification machines that were used on Election Day to yet another company, GenKey, a Dutch-based biometric technology company. Widespread technical failures of the equipment on Polling Day led to extensive delays, and required voting extensions. Let Vincent Alexander, Nigel Hughes and Aubrey Norton try telling their most ardent admirers to come back tomorrow to vote, because “de machine bruk”.

Even though the contracts that the ECG signed with STL, GenKey, and others were never properly scrutinized, the ECG tried to justify outsourcing the process because they said it saved them the financial resources required to build up their own in-house capacity.

Why would Lewis take the time to research the Ghanaian 2012 election and use it to shame GECOM, but fail to mention that the ECG handed over control of the country’s critical election infrastructure to multiple third-party companies?

I submit that his omission was on purpose; Lewis knows that the majority of Guyanese and the PPP/C would never agree to outsource the most fundamental aspect of their democracy to dubious foreign companies.

And yet Amanza Walton-Desir has the audacity to call the PPP/C “lazy”. Her party had five years; counting the months after the December 2018 no-confidence vote, and five months of pain and agony they inflicted on the nation following the 2020 elections, and they handed a doddering political economy to the PPP/C. Numbers expose APNU+AFC’s lethargic and sluggish approach to the welfare of Guyanese.

For the first time in the history of Guyana, six new hospitals will be opened this year. A new maternal and pediatric hospital is being constructed at Ogle. New Amsterdam will have a new hospital, and so will Moruca, Kato and Kamarang. These new hospitals will come equipped with digital x-ray equipment, CAT scans, mammography and MRI machines. Walton-Desir’s government built nothing.

In 2020, President Ali authorised that every dialysis patient receive $600,000 a year. Last year, there were 550 patients receiving dialysis in Guyana, and the government assisted them by paying for all their laboratory tests, and footed the cost of their expensive medication.

In 2019, Walton-Desir’s government supported 64 dialysis patients, and gave them a one-off $300,000 grant. Many of them died because they couldn’t afford to pay for their dialysis treatment.
Between 2020 to 2024, 2,563 heart disease patients were treated, free of cost, and they are alive today because this government removed barriers to allow doctors to insert as many stents as required to keep them alive. Walton-Desir’s government was so entangled in bureaucracy, that only 37 heart patients received stents in 2019.

The PPP/C facilitated the 68,000 eye examinations nationwide last year alone, while the APNU+AFC turned a blind eye to a problem affecting the lives of thousands of young Guyanese.
And, for the first time in the history of Guyana, this government conducted 12,000 HPV tests to check for the virus that causes cervical cancer. And last year, the Ministry of Health conducted 13,000 Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) tests.

Instead of berating the PPP/C for doing a job they’ve failed at, I would much prefer the APNU+AFC applaud from the sidelines, like happy cheerleaders entertaining Guyanese at half-time or during warm-up sessions, because this government is just getting started.

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.