We must all reject this push by the PNC to go back to 1985
Dear Editor,
To properly understand the gravity of David Granger’s gambit pertaining to the appointment of the Chairman of GECOM, one must walk back to the year 1985. Forbes Burnham had died in August 1985 and he was succeeded by Desmond Hoyte. Guyana in 1985 was hoping for a fresh wind of change with Burnham’s death. The PNC dictator was dead and that development presented the nation with a golden opportunity to repair itself. The holding of free and fair elections and elections free from fear in December 1985 was the first imperative to put Guyana back on the progressive path.
Unfortunately, Hoyte stubbornly refused to budge on any of the prerequisites to hold free and fair elections. Although as a former Minister of Finance, he was aware of the situation where the nation was in a race to the bottom, he refused to institute reforms. Some insiders told me that he was afraid of the PNC strongmen at that time. Thus he complied with the “diktats” of those strongmen. He refused to count the ballots at the place of polls. And most importantly he refused to demolish the system where the Elections Commission Chairman was unilaterally appointed by the Head of State without consulting anyone.
At that time we had an Elections Com-mission Chairman called Harry Bollers who was nothing but a post box or a glorified rubber stamp. His role was just to pass documents and messages between interested parties.
The end result from this immoral structure was that those 1985 elections turned out be the most rigged, manipulated and crooked elections in the entire history of Guyana.
Since then the majority of this nation, (not only the PPP), including non-political players like the Electoral Assistance Bureau, the Private Sector, the Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, along with friends of democracy in the Diaspora, the International Community, the Carter Center among others, were able to leverage the powers of the United States of America to isolate the PNC political, financially and diplomatically. The situation was made untenable for the PNC cabal to the point that no one internationally wanted to do business with