January 23 2019
In journalism, there are several categories of the supplier of information. There is your friend who has a substantial position in a particular entity. The friendship is not publicly known and over the years, this person has been an impeccable supplier.
There is the trusted source. This is a level lower than your friend. This is someone that you have had a long established relationship with. You trust that person with the supply of information, and it has held good over a long period of time. The third level is called the reliable source. The closeness with the journalist is not there as in levels one and two. But the person sees you as a person that is dependable to publish information that the public needs to know
The other levels need not be discussed. For this column, the information that is revealed in the title of this column has come from the third category listed above. At the very last minute, Gail Teixeira, Frank Anthony and Dr. Vindhya Persaud were called into a room and asked to withdraw from the contest for the presidential candidacy. I first disclosed this on the Naim Chan early morning television show on CNS channel 6 yesterday.
Anthony and Persaud have offered different reasons for withdrawing. This is what party loyalty demands. Refusal would certainly have engendered serious rifts in the party’s leadership. But Anthony and Persaud do not depend on the state for an income; they are vital elements in the PPP’s physiology, so they should be honest with the Guyanese people. Anthony and Persaud know who they confided in.
Teixeira’s exit has no theoretical or political importance to the shape of the contest, so I will not dwell on her decision to quit. She was asked to participate to split the votes. See my column of Tuesday, January 15, 2019, “Is Gail Teixeira fit and proper to be president?”
The forced withdrawal of Anthony and Persaud has uncertain consequences for the future of the PPP. If Nandlall would have received 9 votes, had Anthony and Persaud remained in the arena then it is possible that the 24 ballots that Irfaan received would have been split between Persaud and Anthony, giving either one of them victory. Sadly, it seems that if you do the mathematical equation it looks like Nandlall was never going to win.
The ballot was secret. Unless the process was engineered, and I am told that the secret use of the pen was not tampered with, then Anil simply lost out. You can say the 35 voters were manipulated before the meeting convened. But either persons voted out of fear or just didn’t want Anil. Surely, even if some central committee members felt that they owed Jagdeo favours or that Jagdeo promised them goodies, secret balloting could have saved them. All they had to do was to insist to Jagdeo that they voted for Irfaan and offer to take a lie detector test, which wouldn’t have been done anyway.
Looking at the small number of votes Anil got (you have to discount the ballots of Anthony and Persaud, because they would have had to vote for themselves if they had remained, it appears that either Anthony or Persaud would have won that race. It meant that had they stayed in the ring, either one of them would have pulled more than Anil’s 9 votes and become the presidential candidate.
Let us do some guesswork. Irfaan, Anthony and Persaud had to split 26 votes among themselves, because Anil’s tally was already decided. Is it possible Anthony could have picked up 11, Persaud 9, leaving Irfan with 6, including his own? The results would have been, Anthony 11, Anil 9, Persaud 9, Irfaan 6. Or maybe it could have been Persaud 11 and Anthony 9.
The decision to force the fait accompli on Anthony and Persaud was a perceptive one. Those who did it perhaps knew what the Guyanese population didn’t. And that is, Anil would not have won, contrary to popular thinking, and that Anthony or Persaud would have been the real favourite. No matter what kind of manipulation went on weeks before the voting, 26 persons voted against Anil and they did not do it by a show of hands.
My choice was Anil. I do like him. I think he was the better candidate, though I would have liked to see a woman winning the prize. I think most people expected Anil to win. And I would like to know why his showing was so poor. In the meantime, Anthony and Persaud should know that Guyana has a small, overlapping population, so people know that they confessed.