Granger Lewis ignored, will Trump ignore Flynn?
Kaieteur News – Lincoln Lewis of Guyana and Michael Flynn of USA are two dangerously ignorant men. Flynn is of course much more educated than Lewis and much less crass and intellectually empty than Lewis so one expected better. Flynn was an award-winning general in the US army. Lewis on the other hand will be a one man army in the trade union congress.
Why are they insignificant? Let’s quote Lewis first. After endorsing the work of GECOM chairperson Ms Claudette Singh, Lewis suffered a mild mental stroke in late July, Singh said that CARICOM had observed the recount of the election and received victory in opposition – the incumbent PNC-AFC was defeated.
Anticipating Singh’s statement of PPP victory, Lewis said publicly on the radio station run by US-based Mark Benschop, “If the Election Commission’s actions are unworkable to the interest and intent of the Constitution and the ethos of this country . , then President Granger will have to take action. Whatever form it takes. We cannot have an election riddled with irregularities that we consider to be inflexible… Mr Granger will have to act, if the Electoral Commission fails the people of the country. ”
If he were not so ignorant and had done elementary research, Lewis would know that in all countries with free and fair elections and a written constitution, the president is not above the constitution. In Guyana, during his presidency, the Caribbean High Court and Court of Appeal ruled that President Granger was not above the constitution seven times.
Under Guyana’s constitution, the president cannot even choose the chairman of the electoral body much less to interfere and overturn the decision of the electoral commission. It is interesting to note that Lewis avoided any mention in his gestural morbidity that the man he was urging to face GECOM was a presidential candidate at the very election, and he lost his result. That Lewis loser appealed, for him to get rid of the result and stay in power. So a presidential candidate loses an election and decides to guillotine the organization that conducted the election and pronounce on the results and remain in power.
That may be how the trade union congress is running its elections with Lewis at the helm. It doesn’t work like that in Guyana and Guyanese didn’t even give Lewis and Granger an inch to touch GECOM. Granger was of course more intelligent and educated than Lewis knew better and accepted Ms.’s statement. Singh. Over in the US, President Trump’s close confidante, former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, is advising Trump to declare a state of emergency in order to undermine the presidential presumption by 2020 election winner, Joe Biden.
We know in Guyana that the president did not accept Lewis’s assassination and so surrendered victory. Will Trump embrace Flynn’s advice? The world has to wait and see but the implications of Lewis and Trump’s encouragement are horrific and horrific. When an incumbent loses, he / she must not accept the result. This is what Lewis told Guyanese. This is what Flynn tells Americans.
If humans are behaving in the way that Lewis and Flynn want them to do, then this world would only have a handful of leaders, since the birth of free and fair elections after the 19th century. Why? Because the government wouldn’t change hands because you only have winners and the winners can’t lose then the world will only see a small number of leaders.
It is interesting to note that Lewis and Flynn’s advocacy circumstances are identical. In Guyana, not one large organization accepted Granger’s claim to victory even the rabid anti-PPP entity, ACDA did not announce PNC’s victory. There was not even a lone voice in Africa, Europe, Asia, South America that endorsed Granger’s claim for re-election.
In the United States, the Republican Party, in a united front, has not accepted Trump’s claim of victory. We tend to judge people by the society in which they live. When you belong to a rich, industrialized nation with a wealth of value, postmodern infrastructure, hundreds of universities, thousands of newspapers, magazines, radio stations, TV stations, you tend to see the mindset of people as more enlightened ones.
That is madness and has no scientific basis. People are all the same no matter where they live, no matter how rich or poor they are, no matter what race they were born into. Flynn from the richest country in the world offered exactly the same advice to his president as Lewis from a poor Third World country.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)