PNCR hood-winking supporters, going to polls
Guyana's main opposition Peoples National Congress Reform (PNCR) is surely limping along to the polls, despite ongoing claims that the 2006 Voters List will be bloated with the names of dead people and those who have left these shores for supposedly greener pastures. While the PNCR's claims may be valid , that one-time all-powerful institution finds itself today lacking the much needed human and financial resources to mobilize effectively to contest another general and regional elections. Knowing fully well, based on its own internal surveys and historical electoral experience, that the PNCR cannot win the upcoming polls; Congress Place is busy cultivating in the minds of their supporters that the Peoples Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) will cheat its way to victory. Well aware of other safeguards like Claims and Objections, a Voters List accompanied by photographs of electors, indelible ink and party polling agents to verify each voter; the PNCR is using house-to-house verification as its lynch-;pin to convince its supporters that the PPPC would have rigged the elections. This ground-work will also give them leverage to possibly to mount a High Court challenge of the results as it had done in 1997, leading to the Justice Claudette Singh vitiating the elections on the grounds that the use of Voter Identification Cards were unconstitutional. This, however, did not mean that there was not the system of one-person-one-vote. The PNCR, also has another execellent reason to hood-wink its supporters- that party, after 28 years in office and 13 years in opposition, does not have the money and the manpower to vigorously campaign across the length and breadth of Guyana, deploy polling agents to all polling stations on elections day and guarantee their traveling and subsistence. Though dismally prepared, the PNCR is under immense pressure from the International Community to conntest the elections and sure the party will finally do so, despite its clarion call of "No Verification, No Election." If the PNCR is so bent on boycotinng the General Elections if there is no verification, then it should stop vascillating and tell its supporters openly and unambiguosly and honestly so. Instead, what we are seeing is the PNCR's manipulation of the minds of its whittled down support-base to give the party more time to muster much needed financial resources for the campaign. The latest political gimmickry capitalising on the gullible and maleable minds of the PNCR's predominantly Black supporters was played out outside the Parliament Buildings on May 2 when the President of the Guyana Trades Union Congress (GTUC) Lincoln Lewis played the role of chief PNCR puppet by reiterating what he had told a GTUC May Day Rally. He had 'threatened' to tell PNCR supporters that their leaderserhip betrayed them if the PNCR Members of Parliament (MPs) had entered the National Assembly. Outside Parliament on May 2, a hyped up Lewis was to have heard shouting "The people have spoken" on seeing the PNCR MPs standing on the road outside Parliament Building. Lo and behold, minutes later PNCR Leader Robert Corbin arrived and went up to the supporters, shouting "No Verification" to which they responded "No Election," after which he told them that he was going inside the National Assembly to "hear" what the government would say to a PNCR proposal. In the end, Corbin and Lance Carberry crossed the picket-line, enetered the National Assembly and participated in the debate. Lewis must be regretting his expression, "The people have spoken," and that he has been manipulated by the PNCR, after having been in the pro-democracy anti-PNC camp in the 1970s and 1980s. In the end, the PNCR will have to satisfy itself with a watered-down campaign and monitoring of some of polling stations. Signs that the party will contest include the failure of party leader Robert Corbin to tell reporters recently that it will not contest the polls if there is no verification and more recently the crawling in back of the opposition-nominated commissioners to the Elections Commission. Now, the Elections Commission is expected to decide on some form of sample verification as opposed to house-to-house verification about which the PNCR itself has toned down on. This will have a two-pronged effect: Firstly, it will give both sides of the political divide a chance to agree to special safeguard measures at polling stations where stuffing of ballot-boxes in the names of deceased and migrants and secondly, those assusrances of safeguard measures will give the PNCR an opportunity to achieve its objective of withdrawing clarion call for house-to-house verification without 'looking bad' in the eyes of its supporters. The reality is that the PNCR has been displaying dismal failure to get the required numbers to come on the streets and is so embarassed that it must find a way of calling its motley crew off the streets, even if in the end it does not even get the minimum sample verification. Accepting sample-verification and safeguard measures at designated polling stations, however, still gives Congress Place a window of opportunity to challenge their defeat on the streets and in the courts to again give the PNCR supporters some satisfaction, while MPs enjoy yet another five years of privelges such as duty-free concessions on the backs of their election-fatigued supporters. Had the PNCR not found a way to back-peddle from house-to-house verification, Congress Place knows fully well that international pressure and even condemnation would have intensified on it to avoid pushing the country into a potentially deeper constitutional crisis by having house-to-house verification. The PNCR had hoped that process would turn up huge flaws that would have triggered their next call for a complete registration that can push back elections by at least another 18 months to two years. The fact that the PNCR is about to contest the elections does not give the PPPC the liberty to take the PNCR's electoral paralysis for granted. Surely, with the infusion of post-elections energy into its lumpen proletariat support-base, that party can cause untold disruption especially in the centre of the city. Already faced with a grave security dilemma, the PPPC should avoid playing into the hands of the PNCR at a time when there is a proliferation of hand-guns, rifles and shotguns that can be used out of both political and downright criminal opportunism in a climate of grave electoral instability. The next PPPC administration should, instead, extend the olive branch to the PNCR to participate in the political management of Guyana, if this Green Land of Ours is to maximise its potential.
