What is the obsession with polls in Guyana?

Sep 26, 2009 Letters

Dear Editor,
I recall the day I met Vishnu Bisram – February 10, 1990 – at a meeting on Liberty Avenue, attended by approximately 300 Guyanese activists. At this meeting the World Union of Guyanese was formed under the guidance of Dr. Fenton Ramsahoye.
Bisram had joined me and others at meetings with several U.S. Congressmen to request their specific support for interaction with U.S. State Department and the Hoyte Government leading towards the end goal of Free and Fair Elections in Guyana.
Bisram has been steadfast in his commitment towards some good causes for most of his adult life, and never wavered in all these years.
Bisram has been employed with NYC’s Department. of Education as a teacher assigned to Transit Tech High School in Brooklyn since the mid-1980s. His annual salary is approximately $100,000.
What is NACTA? Let us say NACTA is a name invented by Bisram and a few of his teaching buddies. Originally it was indeed founded by a about half-a-dozen chaps of his ilk. But that’s it, just a name.
Mr. Kissoon, NACTA is not Gallup or Harris or some million-dollar polling organisation. All of Bisram’s polling work is done at his kitchen table with a laptop that has some simple polling/statistical software.
NACTA does not need to have websites etc.; it is not a commercial enterprise and does not solicit polling business. NACTA is Bisram and Bisram is NACTA.
In August 1997 Mr. Bisram asked me to travel with him to Georgetown to conduct a poll just before the December 1997 elections. My reaction to him was: Why do you need polls for Guyana. Don’t you know everyone there votes strictly race. Get the census numbers or the electoral roster and count the number of Indian and African names – and call the elections based on which ethnic group has the larger number. Mr. Bisram made a clever argument that things may have changed and enough Indians may have emigrated to lose their numerical advantage.
I had not returned to my homeland in 25 years. I agreed to go. Bisram asked me to prepare a questionnaire. I wrote three questions: (a) Race of subject? (b) How did you vote in the last election? (c) How will you vote now?
On the morning after our arrival Mr. Bisram and I showed up at the UG campus where about 50 people had showed up in response to an ad in the Chronicle. Bisram interviewed and hired 20 canvassers and gave them 100 questionnaires each and assigned them to different regions of Guyana.
Many of the canvassers were known to Bisram as they had worked for him in the lead-up to the 1992 elections. They were paid $14,000 each for their work.
Mr. Bisram collected the questionnaires and did what any pollster would do – organise, tabulate and maybe, fed the numbers to his computer. The software crunched the numbers – and lo and behold – Mr. Bisram reported his results.
The Chronicle, a government-owned newspaper, had commissioned and paid for the cost of the poll. Mr. Bisram had been invited by the Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy to share his privileged information before they were published.
I am privy to this much information: Mr. Bisram factors in the Indian population at 50%, not 43% as is often reported in news articles. (I personally believe the Indian population still stands today at 50%, which was about the same in the 1964 elections, when the PPP polled 49.5% of the vote and when almost every single vote came from Indians).
Questions: How do you construct a sample to reflect the exact racial breakdown in the population (Indians at 50%; Africans at 35%)? The questionnaires I perused in 1997 revealed almost no cross-racial voting. Do you decide on a sample size of, say,100 and then place 35 questionnaires filled in by Africans, 50 by Indians, and 8 by Amerindians in the sample basket?
Why waste time setting up a sample, when people do not vote outside the box? After figuring that cross-racial voting is less than 5%, then the sensible thing to do is use the whole electoral list as your sample size.
Mr. Kissoon is almost fanatical in his claim that no poll was done and that Bisram pulls the numbers out of thin air. Well there is a hard copy of each and every questionnaire.
Are there flaws in these polls? I just pointed out the lunacy of sample size. About design? What was the clear purpose of Bisram’s July poll? To measure Jagdeo’s popularity? Jagdeo cannot run, period. He is barred constitutionally. Is it to poll likely candidates who may become the PPP’s presidential candidate in the 2011 elections? Well do that. Ramsammy is not a likely candidate, period. Why place Ramsammy in the mix with Robert Persaud, Ralph Ramkarran and the General Secretary Donald Ramotar?
How many people say that Ramsammy and Robert Persaud are the two most popular and hardworking Ministers? Was it 300 of the sample size of 722 or was it 5 people? And, how did that statement get reported as part of the poll results. These kinds of flaws only feed the cynicism of the public and feed the beast, Freddie.
What about Robeson Benn and Roger Luncheon? Are they not potential candidates too? Or African guys are not worthy and mentionable candidates of the PPP?
Let us conclude by saying the following:
(1) In a country of 700,000 people with an electorate of 350,000 (half of the population are over 18 and registered to vote), yes, a one-man polling outfit can conduct an effective and genuine poll with the help of hired canvassers. He does not need a Gallup-sized organisation with websites etc. Bisram is really running a shoe-string outfit.
(2) Mr. Kissoon should hone in on the construction of the sample size and the design of the poll? (Was the purpose of the poll to measure Ramsammy’s or Jagdeo’s popularity?). The fact is: a poll had been conducted. Canvassers had been hired and been paid, hardcopy questionnaires filled in by 750 potential voters.
(3) Who paid for the poll? There is a perception that the objective of the poll was to measure Jagdeo’s popularity – and it is this perception that fueled speculation that President Jagdeo may have paid for the polls.
The mere existence of this perception destroys whatever credibility remained of the polls after the outlandish statement about Robert Persaud and Ramsammy being “the hardest working and most popular Ministers of the government”.
(4) Bisram should provide the names of the canvassers – and even the hard copies of the filled-in questionnaires – to both the newspapers and Mr. Kissoon. What is there to hide?
Now what does Bisram’s day job and academic qualifications have to do with anything?
What is the obsession with polls in Guyana? How did both the government-owned Chronicle in 1997 and the SN in 2006 get suckered in the foolishness about polls? There are two major ethnic groups in Guyana and practically every last man votes his ethnic party. So just look at the Census data. You do not need polls.
In 1997 I walked with Mr. Bisram on Robb Street from Bourda cricket ground across town to Water Street – and interviewed almost every person on the sidewalk and in stores and on the street – and found not a single African or Indian who would vote outside of his ethnic base.
A note for Mr. Kissoon. Freddie: Guyana is a very flawed democracy. Ethnic tensions will boil over again as it did in the past. Africans see the PPP as an Indian government and they are seething. Dr. Hinds, Eric Phillips and Tacuma Ogunseye are calling for power sharing. I am sympathetic to what Phillips sees as a fundamental unfairness in the society, i.e. Africans permanently locked out of executive power.
However, the solution to the problem lies in all of us, Africans and Indians, joining together and calling for an end to the existence of ethnic parties.
A mandate comprising of all your votes coming from basically one ethnic group can never be a legitimate and moral mandate to govern a country with such a unique breakdown of the races.
Both the Indo-ethnic PPP and the Afro-ethnic PNC must agree to end the window-dressing strategy they have practiced for the last 50 years. Be committed to genuine multi-racial party platforms and work to win over at least 20% cross-racial support.
If the PPP chooses to elect another Indian as its leader for the 2011 election, they will make no secret of their intention – which is they are not interested in helping the nation evolve into a genuine multi-racial democracy.
History just repeats itself. Why? There are no statesmen around – none left.
Mike Persaud