I have been co-hosting the “Election Watch” programme on Kaieteur Radio for eight days now and each night generates more mysteries in the air. As we interview the different stakeholders, they tell us things that paint a portrait of a post voting scenario that may never have happened before in the modern world.
Of course, all of these emanations have so far not been responded to by personnel from the APNU+AFC because they are not responding to requests to come the studio.
Here are some of the things I have interpreted as mysteries that were said on Kaieteur Radio. Along with these are some other inscrutable situations not found in the real world.
Mystery 1- The police ordered all persons to leave the GECOM Command Centre. But who is responsible for that request to the police or did the police act on their own?
M2 – Two private sector guests told us that when the building was cleared. Persons were seen putting up blinds on the windows.
M3- The Chief Election Officer, Lowenfield, came out of a room and appeared to be listening to the requests of the different stakeholders when his deputy, Roxanne Myers, came out of another room, contradicted the CEO and from then took over the command centre.
M4- Chairperson Claudette Singh was locked in a room for hours. What was happening in that room with her? Why no one could have entered the room? Why the police stopped even persons that she asked to see?
M5- How did the police know she was in fit and proper physical health thus felt right in their decision not to allow anyone in?
M5 – Did Ms. Singh know after she left the room that the police were stopping her visitors and has she publicly dealt with the matter?
M6- Where are the five hundred statements of poll that have not been verified? Who have them?
M7- When the verification of the SOPS for Region Four resumed after it was stopped, GECOM verification officials began to read the results from a spreadsheet. After the votes allocated to each party in seventeen SOPs differed from the spreadsheet, there were protests and Lowenfield agreed to use the SOPs directly.
Which CARICOM official made up that spreadsheet? Was that person blind, drunk or mentally incapacitated when they prepared the spreadsheet? A simple analogy should suffice.
Each employee in a company has a pay slip for work done. The boss requires a spreadsheet to record the amount for each worker. If Singh was paid $2000, Brown, $3000; De Jesus, $4000, the person putting down that figure the clerk is liable to make mistake but could the clerk make seventeen continuous mistakes before he was ordered to stop putting down his figures?
M8- Are Returning Officer for Region Four, Mr. Mingo, and Lowenfield in the country? And if Lowenfield is, why do he and Singh not see the need to meet with a selected group of reporters?
M9- Why is no one from the APNU and AFC speaking about the need to verify the remaining 500 SOPs? If the ANPU+AFC won the election then the verification of those 500 SOPs would shut the mouth of the world.
M10- Why Mr. Granger keeps addressing the nation on the election controversies in his capacity as president when as president he did not participate in the election?
Does the head of APNU have views on the stoppage of the verification process? Does the head of APNU agree or not on the question of resuming the verification process?
M11- At the time of writing, The US Secretary of State spoke about his communication with the Deputy Prime Minister of Canada about the “democratic transition” (those two words were used) in Guyana but mysteriously, there has not been a package of reaction presented to powerful international stakeholders that offer evidence that the APNU+AFC won the election and that the grey areas are deliberate fictions by the opposition parties.
Isn’t that what the winner should do in such a situation of exigency?
M12- There has been no organisational statement from any credible, independent entity endorsing the “victory” of the APNU+AFC. If there is one or several, I have not seen them in any of the daily newspapers including the Chronicle.
M13- One week after former Prime Ministers, Bruce Golding of Jamaica and Owen Arthur of Barbados as international observers and the rest of the foreign observers assembly that have rejected GECOM’s official Region Four results, there hasn’t been a change in their position. Maybe this last one isn’t a mystery after all.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)