GECOM and Local Government elections
A week ago, a brief flashback took place between the National People’s Congress (PNC) and GECOM Chairman Justice (rtd.) Claudette Singh, after Singh rebuffed a call from PNC Secretary General Amna Ally for the Chair to meet her alone with PNC delegation due to discuss Local Government Elections (LGEs) issues this year.
The position taken by the PNC is a very strange one. First, it is not the PNC represented in Parliament on its own strength, but the PNC within two concentric cycles of coalition that must be admitted as weak and weakened. There is, a Partnership for National Unity that now only includes the PNC and the almost extant Guyana Action Party (which shows no sign of life), and the Keith Scott National Front Alliance, which is more prominent than it is either “national” or “alliance.” ”Therefore, the PNC, as a political entity in itself, does not have an inherent right to demand a lone audience with the Chair of the Election Commission on any issue, and this comes from a position of pure ethical logic.
An even more compelling reason, however, for the Chairman to properly and reasonably refuse to meet only the PNC Executive, is because that executive has been significantly involved in collusion with elements of GECOM, to engineer a fraudulent outcome at the last election. From PNC Chairman Volda Lawrence signing to the fraudulent statements from District Four Returning Officer Clairmont Mingo (with whom she is currently facing several charges), to the then President and Leader PNC David Granger personally leading accusation to undermine GECOM’s legitimate work for five months after a narrowly missed election, Congress Place has no moral or legal right to an audience chaired by the Chairman of a Constitutional body tried to undermine it. The political opposition has three commissioners sitting on the body that has a mandate to raise its concerns at Commission level, and is also free to meet with the Commission as a whole.
That does not mean that the plausible reason the party has offered as the rationale for the meeting is entirely unfounded. The question of regular cleaning of the list in preparation for Local Government Elections is one that merits discussion, considering that a new registration process was under way before the Granger No Confidence vote on the Granger administration in December 2018. However, those negotiations cannot be used as a ploy to expel the Constitutionally-due slate LGEs later this year. One gets the sense that the PNC, in the wake of a disastrous showing at the 2018 LGEs, even as an incumbent with access to government resources who generously directed its campaign efforts, saw it in his interest to postpone the those very local elections he had come back after a two-decade hiatus under the PPP.
The PPP government on its behalf must not only, as it has indicated, lobby for the removal or refusal of GECOM staff who conspired with the coalition in the rigging attempt, many of which are currently before the courts system electoral fraud charges, but that it goes to local government elections resists the temptation of incumbent administrations to try to abuse state resources to consolidate national political control by dominating local government organs.
Against this backdrop, GECOM’s autonomy will be paramount. Recently, after a post-election period in which the Justice Justice Chairman gave the public an unreasonable justification to question her decision when dealing with political players seeking to aggravate the democratic process, her Iron Lady label is unwarranted. That decision will be necessary to restore public confidence in GECOM’s work as the country enters its first election after the 2020 debate.