One of the secrets of 2020 has now been revealed
Kaieteur News – The angles, dimensions, attitudes, untold stories and secrets of the Second World War are said to be exhausted; that there will always be a secret or anonymous saga to write about. Guyana has its own World War II. The five months of rigging ended in failure when Dr. Irfaan Ali stepped in as president.
Two important stories have already been published by this columnist. These hidden dimensions can be publicized by the press, not the key players. I guess that will be a rest for them to draw attention to when making their memoirs. One of these two scenarios is that the then chair of CARICOM, Prime Minister Mia Mottley, suggested to Granger that the easiest way out of the dilemma was to count the votes again and because the votes are not yet up age at half a million then it should be done.
Granger and Jagdeo agreed. Granger withdrew the covenant and took refuge behind the explanation that he cannot prevent a private citizen from going to court to prevent the recount. But PNC Granger candidate Roysdale Forde argued the case for the private citizen. This got the Trinidadian Prime Minister Keith Rowley angry and washed his hand of the election relationship.
The other secret was about why Granger admitted. No diplomat or politician has written on this aspect of the five-month saga. I explained it in my column yesterday so there is no need to focus on that topic today.
We are now coming to an event in the five months of the election theater that has not been publicized. The PNC got some diaspora Guyanese well placed to contact the Black Caucasus of the American House of Representatives to intervene on its behalf. The concoction was simple – the election was rigged to keep the Black government out of power. The PNC acted in the most naive way to think that it can deceive highly respected, educated Black congressmen and congressmen by telling them something and they would believe the PNC.
The PNC has no idea how the Black Caucasus in the US operates. These are law makers who have extensive links with Black countries including the Caribbean nations. What some members of the Black Caucasus did was rely on the elaborations of two former CARICOM Prime Ministers whom they knew closely – Bruce Golding of Jamaica and Owen Arthur of Barbados.
Members of the Black Caucasus contacted knew nothing of David Granger, Joe Harmon, Volda Lawrence and Raphael Trotrman. But they knew Bruce Golding and Owen Arthur. The PNC’s initiative to bring the Black Caucasus aboard the ship was an ignorant failure.
One of the sordid stratagems used after this fiasco was to target Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves as a White man. He had replaced Mottley as chairman of CARICOM. It was no accident that the only CARICOM head condemned by Eusi Kwayana was Gonsalves. He published a letter in the Guyanese newspapers accusing Gonsalves of speaking on the election results when Gonsalves knew the matter was before the courts. This was yet another episode of Kwayana’s decline in Sydney King politics.
After failing to get the Black Caucasus to accept that the APNU + AFC had won the election, the PNC sought an alternative route to paint the election as Indians versus the All Blacks. This time Vincent Alexander was the transmission line. I have dealt with this play in several columns but in the context of the failure to succeed with such a strategy with the Black Caucasus, it is useful to repeat it.
The Guyanese chapter of the Year for people of African descent wrote the five visiting CARICOM Prime Ministers who came to Guyana during the crisis with the assumption that the March 2020 election exposed the dangerous ethnic fault lines between Africans and Indians and CARICOM should use that reality to shape a new spill in Guyana.
PMs ignored the rise for two reasons that the analyst must look out for because PMs will not address the issue publicly. One is that the Prime Minister would have found it strange to lend CARICOM certification to prevent an election that forms the legal basis on how governments come into being. Second, the PMs knew that if they had to act then PNC and PPP would have had to agree. It would have been a waste of time, as the winner, the PPP, would not have endorsed anything other than the legal statement. A footnote is in order. The PNC believed that CARICOM and the Black Caucasus would use ethnic criteria to judge the election result. The PNC does not understand the human race.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)