I AM the only person in the Guyanese community in and outside of Guyana that has written critical and exposing comments about the political methodology of the EU Mission in Guyana. I have done about four columns for this newspaper on the politicised decisions the EU Mission has taken over the years. My source is impeccable and because of that I have published the information.

The EU Embassy is Guyana has strong inclinations to favour the opposition parties and anti-PPP civil society groups. In the light of vast areas of intellectual incompetence in the EU Observer Report, I will repeat some of that information before briefly looking at some of the flaws in the elections report.

Ms. Jasmatie Lalljie, assistant to Ms. Evilana Lelbarze, then head of the political division of the embassy (she has returned to Europe) queried how the embassy could only use PNC press releases in the embassy’s ongoing analysis of political trends in Guyana. Ms. Lalljie left because of the consequences.

The EU Mission only offers donations to civil society groups that are anti-government. SASOD and Policy Forum have been recipients of generous donations. Think of the money we are talking about when one Euro is equivalent to G$240.

In the 2023 Local Government Elections, the EU transferred 26, 000 Euros from a Barbadian account to an Amerindian political entity to be transferred to the PNC. The EU Mission was sending donations to the PNC through a GBTI account of a famous Theatre Guild personality.

The Guyana Government objected to this since the Theatre Guild personality was openly anti-government. The money stopped then secretly resumed.

For the 2025 general election, Mr. Van Ness, outgoing Ambassador, selected the local personnel to work with the EU Election Observer team. Each one of the selectees had strong political connections. This explains why the report has huge gaps in it. One of the complaints in the report is access to the state media by opposition parties.

This observation is comically nonsensical, and it reveals that these Western analysts are incompetent people whose research is always poorly done. First, the newspapers and the television are not the forums political parties turn to in election campaigns in the age of social media. None of the political parties placed value on newspaper and television advertisements for the 2025 campaign simply because they knew that such outlets are no longer influential.

The opposition parties put their energy in social media platforms and did not seek out the state media for coverage. One can only imagine what they would have said – “why go there when nobody reads newspapers and watch local television news.” In fact, the WIN party completely blacked out and blocked out mainstream media. WIN concentrated on social media to get its message across.

It is shockingly incompetent on the part of the observer team to focus on lack of coverage in the state media when that forum was downgraded by the opposition and even the incumbent. Lack of access to the state media was not a complaint by the opposition parties.  Nowhere in the report was there any mention of the ugly bias of the two privately owned newspapers – Stabroek News (SN) and Kaieteur News (KN).

Only an incompetent researcher in Guyana would not know that during the campaign, these two newspapers opened their doors fully to the opposition parties. The PPP was a victim of the unfairness to media houses with reasons for the PPP to complain about during the elections.

There aren’t sufficient harsh words to denounce the style and operation of the observer team.

You have to be dishonest to have been monitoring the campaign and not see that KN and SN were giving more coverage to the opposition. All the columnists in those two newspapers were anti-government. From the announcement of the date of elections to the announcement of the results, not one editorial in KN and SN carried a favourable comment on the government.

The incumbent faced a torrent of abuse from an unlimited amount of social media platforms, a degenerative aberration that the EU team failed to even devote a paragraph to. Finally – the theory of incumbency advantage. There is no such thing in the study of comparative politics. I mentioned that in a column six weeks ago and I am repeating it here.

The argument of election incumbency advantage does not exist in any country and certainly not in the countries those members of the observer team live in.

An elected government rules a country even when there is a general election. It does what it promises the nation to do. I know of no country where policies stop during an election campaign.

Election incumbency advantage is repugnant nonsense, and the PPP is best advised to ignore the European thinking of superiority.

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.