Guyana’s no-confidence motion and Granger’s guile

Dear Editor,

Respectfully I would advise you that there must be a mass of people – either diehard loyalist tribal PNC members and supporters or just other “ethnic-specific” political types – who are in full congratulatory mode over PNC Leader David Granger’s guile of current success and triumph.

Those of us interested in politics – which H.N. Critchlow reminded – follows us “from cradle to grave”  in its all-pervasive impact – can appreciate the strategies employed by His Excellency, our Brigadier-President, to teach the political world how to nullify a successful Confidence Motion which should have triggered national elections since March of this year. Submerging the NCM involved the ridiculous, the serious, the incredulous. Basil Williams spent millions of our dollars to employ needed legal assistance to litigate 33 being a simple constitutional majority over 32. And the validity of dual citizenship.

All things considered, our overworked snail-paced courts dealt relatively swiftly with the deluge of constitutional and related cases meant to facilitate delaying of demitting of office by His Excellency’s regime.

Manipulation of the supposedly “independent” elections body – the Constitutional GECOM which depends on government’s timely funding – through a handpicked chairman and three friendly Commissioners ensured that that body was “elevated…above the very Constitution of the Republic”.

Never in a state of necessary perpetual readiness for any level of elections, GECOM’s Four became His Excellency’s handmaidens – PPP or no PPP Commissioners. Thumbing his nose with constitutional and judicial eye-pass our Brigadier-President has presented political students with a Case Study in extra-parliamentary manoeuvres to retain office even in the face of any NC Motion.

My position? It’s both unfortunate and simple: disgust at benign bullyism now made overt and aggressive enough to lose the vote I gave in 2015 and also a renewed indifference to the groupings holding themselves out as leverage-alternatives. My mind is still open but, slowly, an Election Date might be irrelevant to me. How effective are so-called Third-Parties right now?

As for His Excellency, if his mentor Forbes Burnham took out the patent on electoral malpractice, our Brigadier-President is the new political master at undermining the Constitution and the judicial processes. But hail the man! He was/is aided and abetted. He obviously chose correctly and shrewdly in  accepting Justice Singh as a lady “fit, proper and acceptable”. Poor Jagdeo submitted her name after she had refused him first time! And His Excellency suspects, I suspect, that despite their “Breach-of –Constitution” admonition, the Western donor-group has a preference for the urbane scholarly leader, in preference to a Moscow-trained dude when the Exxon-Guyana oil starts to flow.

If Granger allows (?) elections to favour Jagdeo, the Americans/Europeans will adapt. But after all of the above do you-all think His Excellency plans to “move out” in 2020?

His Excellency-retired Brigadier, former Security/Defence adviser, now leader of the PNC and the amorphous APNU, could  never now lay claim to promoting any “Partnership for National Unity (APNU)” or his ministry’s so-called “Social Cohesion”. I embrace “peaceful co-existence”. His Excellency’s forces will now “maintain” that peace relentlessly. Because  I fear not even an election will usher in any significant national harmony. Just let’s “co-exist”. After Granger’s elections in March or April next year.

Should I begin daily letter-writing like some veterans? Nah…I just couldn’t wait  ‘til Friday.

Yours faithfully,

Allan Arthur Fenty