Letters of Harmon
Recently, as a prominent part of some strategy discussed and agreed by the best minds in his orbit, Leader of the Opposition, Joseph Harmon has taken to writing letters to the international community, complaining that his political opponents are not in government plays nice with him and the political machinery, which he claims to lead.
One such example is a letter, sent last month to India’s External Relations Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar in protest against the Irfaan Ali administration posting former APNU + AFC senator Charrandass Persaud as Guyana’s High Commissioner to India. Persaud’s ‘yes’ vote in line with the PPP’s No Confidence Motion (NCM) in December 2018 would have technically seen the collapse of the David Granger administration except that a mix of legal battles and delaying tactics would see elections held not three months on according to the NCM as constitutionally required, but in March 2020. Even then, there would be no change of government until August 2020 because of what has been internationally recognized and condemned as David Granger’s attempt to stealing the 2020 elections. In that letter to Jaishankar, Harmon – who was in the lead and in the middle of the months seeking a coup – idiotically referred to the NCM Persaud vote as “treacherous”, despite that vote to challenge unsuccessfully as even illegal all the way up the Caribbean Court of Justice. The government of India should not dignify that letter with a response that should have been considered informative and embarrassing to Mr Harmon.
It was clearly not. In the latest Leader of the Opposition’s letter, this time to the current Chair of CARICOM, Dr. Keith Rowley, his rebellion and false opposition are all the more:
“I have written several letters highlighting Guyana’s slide into a state of dictatorship under the PPP. I’m sorry to advise, rather than minimize, that this slide was intentionally intense. So far, President Irfaan Ali has categorically refused to meet the Parliamentary Opposition on spectacular grounds ‘recognition by the Opposition Leader and APNU + AFC supporters’ … This Honorary Chairman is undoubtedly infamous, unacceptable, undemocratic and cop out. It is also the antithesis of an inclusive and consultative leadership spirit. ”
A year ago, Harmon was second in charge of the same APNU + AFC who signed an agreement between Guyana’s two main political parties brokered by the then CARICOM Chairman, and then went to try to invalidate that agreement within days. And having failed in that regard, he went on to challenge the outcome of the process governed by the agreement legally. Now, Harmon is still second in charge of APNU + AFC, not only seeking CARICOM’s intervention in brokering dialogue between Guyana’s two main political parties and in doing so citing his support for one recommendation coming out of the a report on the process that not only sought to invalidate but whose present result has been legally challenged is invalid. Whether Rowley was inclined to take on the allegations made in the letter (indeed letters as this appears to be the latest of several unrecognized missions sent to CARCOM), Harmon individually or institutionally has not demonstrate the integrity that deserves a response.
Even the general tone of the latest letter to CARICOM and the person referred to represents a great deal of cognitive dissonance on the part of Harmon and the opposition leadership in general, and is not just one front. First, a year ago, at that time, President David Granger, then and now head of Harmon, apparently invited CARICOM to intervene and sign on recount, and then indecently sent APNU + AFC candidate Ulita Moore to challenge the legality of the recount, Rowley himself. he personally smelled since he assigned his country’s Chief Returning Officer to participate, only to be accused of essentially engaging in illegality and interference. As Rowley would relate to questions from his own Senate about him washing his hands clean from dealing with the Granger administration after that obscene sub-fuel:
“My view and this Government’s view is that, as a result of that altruistic approach, the Chief Elections Officer for Trinidad and Tobago should never be in that position to be charged in that way, in a CARICOM country. So we didn’t send our Returning Officer back there because we wanted to protect our new position in these matters of free and fair elections. ”
Secondly, Harmon addressing Rowley as Chair of CARICOM addresses an office that former political machine occupants have not had the best relationship with by-elections, from Mia Mottley fuming APNU + AFC attempts to rig, to Ralph Gonsalves, Rowley’s predecessor. had to replace Harmon by calling him “just a tool” when the Opposition Leader now tried to disregard Gonsalves for condemning the rigging and suggested that Granger accept the results and take his “lick as a man.”
Harmon must know at some basic level – despite the fact that the face of the rigging, Granger himself, continues to hide – the lack of credibility that the NCM itself was awarded by the APNU + AFC for its attempts to rig the election is that the current brand, and not even better executed sophistication than it clearly can demonstrate as seen in its letters, is going to get rid of that tingling. In addition, he should personally acknowledge that, given the pivotal role he played in last year’s events, he has no respect for the regional leadership that labeled his superintendent a sacred gangster and that he was “mere tools” of the that gangster.
As it was when it was in government and far more substantial than it is at present, it is clear that the APNU + AFC coalition, in particular its main partner of the PNC, has no overall plan and is much more interested in petulance, the blind projection of his incompetence, and the meaningless posture of leadership. With the PNC experiencing its biggest leadership crisis in decades as it faces a disappeared Leader and Party Chairman before court on election fraud charges, APNU is now the thin ‘partnership’ it once was, with With the AFC bleeding itself already deteriorating leadership monthly, Harmon’s letters to the same international community from which the Coalition insulted and alienated itself for five months last year are defiantly international pressure against its rigging in nonsense alone, in the sense that it simultaneously accuses the international community of illegally imposing the Ali administration and then asking that community to intervene in bringing Ali to the table to discuss an agenda that is primarily a fictional list of complaints as agreed in whatever fugue has fallen to Congress Place. Harmon’s letters have zero strategic political value and do not represent the objective reality of Guyana, not any sense of real politik but of the APNU + AFC echo chamber.