“…I have admitted how ashamed I am to know that the PPP, with which I have been associated for 50 years, could become a party to blatant electoral fraud,” wrote Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo in his latest column ‘My Turn’ published in the Guyana Chronicle.
The Prime Minister said that the 2020 dirty tricks have stripped the PPP of any and all pretences, once considered righteous and legitimate, to complain about electoral fraud.
Taking this into consideration, Nagamootoo, a lawyer by profession, opined that this sort of behaviour has now expose to ridicule the party’s supporters, who must unfortunately carry the burden of this fraud.
According to the Prime Minister, “Cheddi Jagan… would have felt betrayed to see this vulgarity and betrayal. It is sad that he had created a party that has survived the Cold War based on adherence to principles of democracy, nationalism, patriotism, and the defence of the ideals of freedom and liberty, only to see all these values being trashed.”
What is even more shameful, he added, is that key PPP “apparatchiks” are in consort with foreign interests and agencies, and local reactionaries, to disrupt the national democratic order in a vulgar and desperate power-grab.
He noted that they have become strange bedfellows since “the major protagonists behind the fraud have been trained by Moscow, once deemed the Mecca of Communist revolutionaries.’’
“I may be generous to feel that such crass behaviour is redeemable. We can revisit our mistakes, and we can correct them before they create schisms that we would be unable to heal, now or in the near future,” Nagamootoo said in conclusion.
The PPP/C and the governing APNU+AFC, the country’s two major political parties, have been relentlessly accusing each other of electoral fraud.
The PPP/C is contending that the APNU+AFC used Region 4’s Returning Officer, Clairmont Mingo to attempt to perpetrate a most “nasty and vulgar fraud” in relation to the tabulation of votes in that electoral district.
The party has repeatedly insisted that Mingo fraudulently gave the governing coalition some 25,000 ballots, which it did not gain in the election, by declaring results from a pre-prepaid spreadsheet instead of the Statements of Poll (SoPs) that were in possession of party agents and local and international observers.
The APNU+AFC, on the other hand, has been pressing the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to investigate reports of dead people and those who have migrated, voting in PPP/C strongholds.
It has further called on GECOM to probe missing ancillary documents from boxes which contained ballots cast in PPP/C strongholds along the East Coast of Demerara.
In his address to the nation on Friday, incumbent President David Granger said that reports of irregularities during the national recount, including unstamped ballots, deceased and migrant voters and missing poll books appear to have been committed intentionally, not accidentally, and demonstrate a pattern of manipulation of the electoral process.
