THIS is the conclusion of my three-part series of looking at some known political actors who have become irrelevant as Guyana moves further and further away from what it was 20 years ago.
Over the decades of a public profile, I quietly smile when I think of how many times my revelations were greeted with long years of silence, then a credible Guyanese would speak out. One such credible Guyanese is Neville Bissember Jr., one of the most accomplished diplomats Guyana produced and a current senior lecturer in international law at UG.
No one can accuse Mr. Bissember of political partisanship and perhaps, given the way his career evolved, he would be more known in PNC domiciles than in PPP circles. In a recent letter in Stabroek News, Mr. Bissember referred to the Guyana Human Rights Association (GHRA) as moribund.

I remain mentally confused as to why so many aberrations take place in this country, but all you hear from the private media, civil society groups, and their supporters is about wrongdoings in the Government of Guyana. Don’t they have people and organisations that commit egregious things, and the perpetrators have no connection whatsoever to the government?
Let’s do a preamble on the GHRA before we touch on their repellent press release that the 2025 general election cannot be classified as meeting the requirement of being free and fair. The GHRA was born in 1979, with Mr. Mike McCormack being its first president. From that year to 2025, Mr. McCormack is still the president, giving him 46 years as head of GHRA. Mr. McCormack is in his eighties.

Not one human living in Guyana over the past 30 years can cite the GHRA’s record of entering the arena of human rights activism and helping the poor and the powerless. From GPL complaints to police mistreatment to employee exploitation to suffering from lack of service in both the private and public realms, no one calls upon the GHRA for assistance because no one in Guyana believes the GHRA is an active human rights entity. The undiluted fact is that only the Stabroek News (not even the Kaieteur News) keeps the GHRA alive.

So last Wednesday, the GHRA did what it has been doing for only the past 30 years – issue press releases. Its latest one is that the five international election groups did not pronounce on the 2025 election as achieving the status of being free and fair. The press release never carries a name but since Mr. McCormack is the GHRA and the GHRA is McCormack, then he is responsible for what the GHRA puts out.

It is vital and it cannot be stressed how vital it is for democratic citizens in Guyana to respond to profoundly dangerous thoughts like these. Of those five groups, four of them – Commonwealth, OAS, CARICOM, and the EU – represent more than 190 countries and spoke on behalf of those countries. All of those countries that were represented by those four entities accepted the results of the election.

The fifth group is the Carter Center. Mr. McCormack has stressed that the five entities did not classify the election as meeting the standard of being free and fair. So according to the epistemological thinking of McCormack, words do not have meaning and since the five groups did not use the words of “free and fair” then no other set of words could convey the meaning of “free and fair.”

But this is exactly what the five groupings of observers did. They pronounced that the election was credible. Nowhere in their reports did they call into question the results of the election, thus the acceptance of the results by the governments they represent. All five organisations accepted that the incumbent was legally and legitimately elected.
What is the point of Mr. Mc Cormack?  Where in any section of the report were the results of the election rejected, queried, or questioned? Where in any section of the report did the observers feel that the integrity of the results should be discussed by their teams? Where in their reports there is a lingering doubt, just one doubt, that the election may not be the true reflection of how people voted?

The five schools of observers have concluded that the 2025 election in Guyana was a successful process. What McCormack is obsessed with are the peripheral issues—composition of GECOM, access to state media, etc. But none of those issues had a bearing on the legitimacy of the voting.

Sadly, McCormack belongs to the past, where the Mulatto/Creole class had enormous power to shape people’s thinking in Guyana, and its major vehicle was the Stabroek News.  I end with Shakespeare from Macbeth.

“A poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon stage
And then is heard no more.”
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.