I am more than a little bit concerned about the lack of urgency with which GECOM Chair has moved to ensure compliance with Article 106 (7) of Constitution

Dear Editor,

Ms Gail Teixeira did an extensive letter in the Stabroek News of August 9, 2019 captioned `GECOM is now an integral part of subversion of constitutional rule …. ‘ Among the points made in the letter is President David Granger’s unsubstantiated claim that the electoral roll is bloated by some two hundred thousand names, a proposition so absurd and false that it caused the Chief Election Officer to distance himself from the statement. For those who may not have read Teixeira’s letter, she demonstrated that if two hundred thousand names were removed from the electoral list, the revised list would have fewer names than the number of persons who voted in the 2015 elections!

I noted with some relief that even though Ms. Teixeira’s letter came some time after the appointment of Justice Claudette Singh as Chairperson of GECOM, it made no explicit criticism of Justice Singh, a person with whom I have engaged in a professional capacity over the past couple of years and of whom I have formed a favourable opinion. But my respect for her goes back even further, to her handling of the Esther Perreira elections petition case in which she was forthright in making coercive orders against the government of the day, among which were the unequivocal holding of elections by a prescribed day and forbidding it from using the state media as an advertising forum for political purposes

As the litigant in a no-confidence motion (NCM) case which the Granger administration appealed unsuccessfully all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice, I am more than a little bit concerned about the lack of urgency with which Justice Singh has moved in ensuring that Article 106 (7) of the Constitution as ruled by the High Court and upheld by the CCJ is observed. Justice Singh knows only too well that the ruling of the CCJ on June 18 needs no gloss and that the rule of law, the Constitution and the rulings by the Chief Justice are violated by any failure to comply.

More than two weeks after her appointment as GECOM’s Chair, Justice Singh has failed to convene a full meeting of that body, apparently because she is awaiting the decision in the case brought by me challenging the house-to-house registration exercise. As a seasoned former judge, she knows better than most Guyanese that the two cases relate to separate matters. The first is the effect of the no-confidence motion,

have become, patently, a complete waste of time. The script, as it is, does little more than seek to direct public attention away from some of the irrefutable truths that have to do with instances of indifference to transgressions fuelled by corrupt arrangements of which a generous measure of evidence has long been forthcoming. We can pin the blame all we like on the limited official deterrent capabilities, there is, as well, generous evidence of a scarcity of will. Who among the official enforcers of policy can honestly deny that the issue of mining and the environment has become what one might call a ‘bigger stakes’ consideration, that there is a great deal more to environmental transgressions in the gold mining sector than simply a matter of official deterrence capability. Not only has the tirade of official responses to occurrences like those in the Kuyuwini River become patently lacking in believability, they have completely lost any sort of traction with those who know better. In that sense they often come across as both defensive and cynical. There is a Kafkaesque quality to the character of the gold mining sector in Guyana (though the propensity is not unique to Guyana) which the committed environmentalist is bound to find unbearable. We have reached a point where official pronouncements resemble a process of simply going through the motions, a practice that bears resemblance to frenetic terrier-like yelps bereft of any sort of menacing intent. One is not, mind you, indifferent to the scarcity of those corrective capabilities. You get the feeling, however, that those deficiencies, all too often, are pressed into service as smokescreens intended to conceal hidden agendas. Gold mining irregularities, like law and order loopholes, on the whole, in some of our interior regions, derive, in large measure, from resourcerelated

including the automatic resignation of the cabinet and of the president as head of cabinet, and the requirement for elections in three months. While the first of these does not impose any duty on GECOM and is therefore not GECOM’s concern, to use the words of the CCJ, there is no ambiguity about article 106 (7) which, again using the words of the CCJ, needs no gloss.

The second matter is in relation to house-to-house registration which is taking place under an Order and the direction of James Patterson whose unilateral appointment by President Granger was also ruled as unlawful by the CCJ. I am confident that Justice Singh does not rule out the possibility of this Administration further prolonging itself in office by taking this case through to the CCJ as well.

It would be a violation of Justice Singh’s duty to the voters of this country and to its constitution and institutions, including the National Assembly and the Courts, if she didn’t ensure that the ruling of the CCJ is carried out. She is well aware that there is no law requiring house-tohouse registration in the existing circumstances of a no confidence motion, or indeed under any circumstances.

deficiencies in our policing infrastructure. But there is another common characteristic here. In the instances of both substantive policing and mining oversight, all too often, genuine weaknesses in execution-related infrastructure are deployed as a means of concealing inefficiencies, incompetence and sometimes worse. In the instance of the gold mining sector the real challenge reposes in reconciling rhetoric about protecting our environmental legacy with the reality of the unbridled lawlessness that sometimes obtains in the sector while, of course, accepting that there are, after all, monitoring and oversight deficiencies to be addressed. With due respect to the Commissioner of the GGMC his reported comments given to the Sunday Stabroek in response to the reports about the occurrences in the Kuyuwini River amount to little more than whistling in the wind. ‘People know different,’ as we say in Guyana. Setting aside what we are so often told are the deterrent limitations of the GGMC there is, as well, a need to face other realities like those that have to do with a strong collective sense of the importance of an environmental legacy that must be afforded the opportunity to outlive the shorterterm aggrandizement that lies at the root of many of the anomalies in the gold-mining sector. It requires new mindsets rather than new laws to bring about that change. It does not appear that either some of the miners or even some of the lawenforcers themselves have as yet arrived at that point of environmental maturity.

I have to admit that her failure to convene a meeting of GECOM to direct the Chief Election Officer to move expeditiously to give effect to the ruling of the CCJ on June 18 does cause me more than a little bit of surprise. For the moment, while I am still willing to give Justice Singh the benefit of the doubt, as the successful litigant in the NCM case and as a citizen of Guyana, I expect her to carry out her duty as Chairperson of GECOM in accordance with the Constitution and the CCJ’s ruling. Yours faithfully,

Christopher Ram