‘Give us a chance’ – AG to OAS

Faced with mounting pressure by the international community over the Coalition’s insistence on holding on to power despite defeat in a No Confidence motion a year and a half ago and now through elections, Attorney General Basil Williams Tuesday urged the Organisation of American States (OAS) to “give us a chance.”

But even in doing so, he insisted that the Coalition APNU+AFC has won the elections despite the fact that the only figures in play are those of a national vote recount which showed clearly that the Opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP) beat APNU+AFC by 15, 416 votes and so President David Granger and APNU+AFC lost the seat of government.

Williams was speaking at a special meeting of the OAS’ Permanent Council. The meeting was called specifically to discuss the elections.

In the face of calls by the international community for there to be a peaceful transition of power, Williams said there can be no peaceful transition because the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) has not yet declared a winner.

It is APNU+AFC which has mounted the legal challenges that seek to bury the results of the recount and use fraudulent figures to keep itself in power.

But Williams argued that since there has not been a declaration by GECOM the action of the OAS to hold a special meeting on Guyana, which could lead to sanction, was not timed correctly.

“All of this is premature,” he said of the members of the OAS who have been heaping pressure on the Coalition to accept defeat or the country will face crippling sanctions.

Despite a population hard pressed by COVID-19 and tired by the protracted political crisis brought on by APNU+AFC’s refusal to give up power, Williams told the OAS that there was no “doom and gloom” and that no “chaotic situation exists.”

APNU+AFC claims to have won the elections even though a national vote recount streamed live clearly established the PPP as the winner of the elections.

The Coalition has used the mountain of unsubstantiated claims of anomalies and irregularities to press its case that there was “corruption” discovered during the recount.

But APNU+AFC has stayed clear of the fraud perpetuated in District Four that caused the corruption of the entire electoral process.

And it is those fraudulent votes, thousands of which were invented in its favour, that Granger’s APNU+AFC is seeking to have declared as the results of the elections so it could stay in power.