THIS past week the EU Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) to the Guyana 2025 General and Regional Elections presented its final report, with much ado. The otherwise creditable report, especially in relation to the procedural conduct and management of the actual election, is tainted with a mountain of comical inuendoes, regurgitation of partisan biases that demonstrates a manifest lack of even the most rudimentary research regarding our political culture. There is a lot to unpack but given space constraints I can only handle at most two matters.

President Dr. Irfaan Ali was caustic in his response to the report. In the social media space, he was accused of displaying anger to a guest of our electoral management apparatus that adds robustness, transparency and legitimacy to our governance model. Some opined that the President should have been more gracious and diplomatic.

In my book, the President had every right to choose a no-nonsense aggressive stance. In fact, if any criticism should be levelled against the President, it should be that he didn’t use crass and coarse language to describe both the content and the composers of that report. So, he has done his diplomatic darndest given the nature of the beast.

The fault with the report is not that it flagged issues for upgrades and refinement, it is that words were carefully coined to frame the incumbent government as the inventor of dastard political schemes unknown to our political culture or strange to political practices in functioning democracies across the globe.

The report stated that, “an undue advantage of incumbency distorted the level playing field during the elections campaign. The President and his administration inaugurated a high number of public projects (hospitals, schools, roads and bridges) …” When in the history of Guyana hasn’t the party in power not used the inauguration of public projects to highlight its accomplishments during a term in office? There are two things about this.

It is dishonest reporting to not state to readers that this has been a long-established practice in our politics by every single incumbent since our founding. In fact, it is an expectation of the electorate, for example, President Ali and his government were bombarded with request to commission the aptly named Bharat Jagdeo River Bridge, Guyana’s single largest mega project in history, before the elections.

The government resisted every effort to be so persuaded, in fact, the Vice-President once remarked that the bridge is there, everyone can see it and they know that the PPP-led government built it, so it was not necessary to rush to a pre-election commissioning. Most of the schools and hospitals commissioned close to the elections were long in the making, they were part of the 2020 election manifesto of the governing party.

In fact, many of those projects hit genuine delays during construction, in a few cases, contractors were fired for slothfulness, it took some time to hire new contractors. The EU report completely ignores that during the term of office some of these very projects caused the very incumbent to lose a lot of political support due to unsubstantiated accusation of corruption, mismanagement and shouts of “friends, family and favourites.”

Despite these adversities, the government was able to complete many of the projects before the end of its term. Should it have downplayed the completion of the very projects for which it took a lot of political licks? The Guyanese electorate keeps score on electoral promises. They punish incumbent parties for having undelivered promises while making new ones. The electorate is unforgiving to incumbents who repeat and bring forward old unfulfilled electoral promises. The non-delivery of projects can be catastrophic to an incumbent party. PPP did not have the luxury of shouting corruption and broken promises; they actually had to deliver.

The second consideration is that, as a frontier oil economy, the sheer number of projects has increased in comparison to any previous time in our history. Elections have come and gone and the government has continued to and has since commissioned scores of projects, at a rate of almost one project per working day.

Maybe the EUEOM need to tell us for which election the incumbent gained an “undue advantage” when each of the many projects continue to be delivered to the Guyanese people, after September 1, including a solar farm in recent days.

The EUEOM report also stated that, “the state media and government-run social media accounts were instrumentalised to amplify campaign messages, further blurring the line between state and party.” The report also commented on the unbalanced reporting of media houses sympathetic to the government.

The mission failed to report that the opposition figureheads have refused to engage and refuse to respond for request for interviews or to share their electoral messages on any traditional and social media perceived to favour the ruling party. Take as an example, The Freddie Kissoon Show (FKS), where I am a co-host, by far the most viewed political show across social media; during the election campaign season, we took time to offer invitation to every opposition presidential candidate and some other leading opposition figures to give their perspective on issues and get their message across to a wider audience than their usual small captive viewership. The FKS also offered each of the candidates it contacted to raise only the topics they find advantageous and to avoid any subject they feel may make them look bad. The FKS has always honoured this as a long-standing policy of the show. Apart from a solitary appearance by APNU’s Ganesh Mahipaul, we were forced to carry on a show that offered perspectives exclusively favourable to the ruling party.

The EUEOM needs to report on the number of interviews and perspective which high opposition operatives refused to give to News Room, The FKS, NCN, Guyana Times and other media perceived to be government friendly. In the same vein they run to poorly viewed and obscured platforms such as GlobeSpan, Context, Nation Watch, Conversations with Rickford Burke and other such shows that reaches only a small captive audience. It’s an inept opposition that lacked confidence in their own message, that constantly hid from the eager hungry public that “distorted the level playing field” not a competent confident government willing to advertise, with excitement, its long list of accomplishments.

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.