Would Jagdeo and the PPP be bamboozled by another APNU+AFC ploy?

Dear Editor,

If I may take you back to election 2015, we can possibly have a confirmed rather than a convoluted understanding as to why we are in a current state of morass. The 2015 election may not have been won by the APNU+AFC caretaker coalition if we factor in the so-called anomalies and Mingo’s double whammy after March 2.  Every election has a margin of error, somewhere between two to five percent, which does not alter the outcome unless the counts are close like what happened in 2015. The final counts may reveal that the so-called anomalies disfavoured the caretaker regime in 2015. The Mingo thing, from a retro lens, was hatched and executed in 2015 but failed in 2020 because the number of votes in other regions were too cumbersome to manipulate in the final tabulation at Region four.

That said, the APNU+AFC coalition sailed into power with a high level of popularity which proved too difficult for them to maintain through self-constructed and imposed poorly thought out plans and policies. The consistent attempt of the President to have a GECOM Chair, for instance, through a unilateral choice embraces the suspicion described above in the 2015 election. Why would a winning political party turned government want to alter the mechanisms that brought it to power? It defies logic? Was it that the President and his gang in the government and GECOM were not confident that what transpired in 2015 would not be repeated in 2020? We know now that the manipulation of votes supported by undesired actions to favour the regime have been attempted, detected, challenged and discredited by domestic and foreign observers. Sad that we live in a different time and place but the mindset and meme of some have not changed. Despite the pappyshow since, we believe it has been a worthwhile journey to ensure that the will of the majority is upheld, nothing more, nothing less. Everything else is secondary to this basic universal human right.

We are here because Bharrat Jagdeo was bamboozled into the APNU+AFC trap door. He fell for one person in the third list of potential GECOM Chairper-sons submitted to him by the President. The current Chairperson has turned out to be a lump on a log, period. The second of Jagdeo’s mistakes is worse than the first one. He should have waited for more clarity on how the recount would be conducted. Look what has been going on: shifting and twisting of focus and intent, the narrating of mis/disinformation, and the denying of every possible result of the recount by the caretaker regime. The nation, except for lawyers perhaps, is confused as to what constitutes an electoral recount. The regime has mastered the art of changing the narrative to ensure its survival in ways lacking shame and self-pruning. In some ways, this is the regime’s source of strength cultivated by thought and action that its power and manipulation have compromised Guyana’s law and order, abetted by the overblown rhetoric from its diehard supporters that the regime won the 2020 election.

In moving forward, Guyanese are waiting with hand-wringing anxiety and belly work to see how things will pan out from the 13th to 16th of June 2020 and thereafter. Are they going to be released from the jaws of a gradual but gripping dictatorship? Are they going to be carrying the burden of their grand-parents and parents living merely in a fight to have an illegal government be removed from power? What plans do the PPP have to deal with a regime that does not want to accept the results of the recount. Would Jagdeo and the PPP be bamboozled by another APNU+AFC ploy?

Yours faithfully,

Lomarsh Roopnarine