…the way to rigging
With cricket in the air (how about them Warriors!!), it might be useful to use a cricketing analogy to describe what’s been going on politically in our dear, old mud land. Basically, since the game’s gonna be played on the PNC’s home turf, they’ve been preparing a pitch that would deliver them the game. Which, we’re now being told, will be played five months hence, March 2, 2020. Now don’t think for a moment that the preparations started after that NCM.
Nah…it begun when the Cabinet was announced and a “Ministry of Citizenship” was hived off from the Ministry of Home Affairs (now renamed Ministry of Public Security). The PNC knew the purpose of winning a war was to begin preparations for the next one. And in the game of politics, the war’s won by how many ballots you can claim for your side at the end of “Elections Day”. The Ministry of Citizenship was going to be in charge of all the records and certificates that decided who gets to be in the NRR.
We’ve all been focusing on GECOM producing the Official List of Electors (OLE) but this comes out of the NRR!! By the time GECOM gets around to checking, the list is already fixed! If a seventeen-year-old shows up with a birth certificate that shows he’s eighteen, how would any GECOM official, or party scrutineer, say different to get him off?? And the same for foreigners who were handed out birth certificates? This padding of the list has been going on for almost five years and since the needed number to put the PNC over the wire is just about 5000, it went on below the radar.
The Plan B for winning the game, of course, will be the action at the polling stations in heavily PNC-dominated areas. All hell will break loose after 6 pm and that’s when dodgy voters will come out of the woodwork. The PPP scrutineers and overseas observers? Don’t go by what happened during the PPP 23 years, be briefed by any oldster who lived through the “Burnham years”!
Within GECOM’s Secretariat, of course, the scoreboard has also been prepared for the big day. Do you suppose that the skewed recruitment to staff the Secretariat – as exposed by the ERC – is a coincidence? Nah!! Any number of googlies can be bowled from inside the Secretariat in the week it’ll take to count less than 500,000 ballots. Why do you think Patterson nixed the appointment of the most experienced GECOM bureaucrat, Vishnu Persaud?
And there are still five months to tweak the pitch!!
…the way to the championship
If it’s one thing that takes our minds away from the political goings on, it’s cricket, glorious Warriors cricket!! On the street corners and under the “bottom houses” the rhetoric may become as sharp and pointed as pikes, but once the Warriors are in Providence Stadium, there’s only love and unity!! Over in Trinidad, home of our arch rival Knight Riders, they have their Carnival that forms the glue to keep them together. Here, it’s Warriors Cricket!!
And this year, all Guyanese know it’ll be the year our boys go all the way to collect that championship trophy. Which, your Eyewitness was told, will be a new one to make the occasion more fitting. And how does he know this?? No, it’s not that he’s a cricket nut – that he is— but this year, you just have to look at the Warriors’ record. Before tonight (as this is written), they’ve won eight on the trot – an unprecedented feat!
And best of all, they beat the TT Knight Riders!!
…the end of the border controversy
While we’re all fixated on the general elections in March 2020, in that month, the World Court will be deciding whether it has the jurisdiction to hear the substantive case.
That’s a formality…and then the albatross will be removed!