Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jun 04, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
There is only one personality in the movie “Ghost Ship” that overshadows the presence of Moses Nagamootoo with some papers in his hand. That personality is the amazing Italian beauty, Francesca Rettondini singing the evergreen Italian ballad, “Senza Fine.”
The hundreds of people dancing to “Senza Fine” on the cruise liner while Nagamootoo goes through his papers are dead people, what we call in Guyana, “jumbies.” It was these ghosts on the ship that handed Nagamootoo the 2020 election results that he wrote in the Chronicle of March 8; “…in the 2020 elections 473,352 persons voted, as against 412,012 in 2015. From those numbers, the APNU+AFC polled 237,004 votes and the PPP/C 229,344, which gives the former a narrow lead of 7,660 votes. Again, it was a narrow margin as in 2015. And when computed, the unofficial projection is that the Coalition would again have a one-seat majority in the National Assembly”
As we near the end of the recount, with 20 percent of boxes left to tally, at the time of writing the PPP is leading by just over 18, 000 votes. The recount so far gives the APNU+AFC 162, 557. If you take Nagamootoo’s numbers, it means that the APNU+AFC will receive about 75, 000 votes more. But when you look at where the boxes are left to be counted, 75, 000 is an impossible achievement.
In Region 6, a PPP stronghold, there are 30 boxes to be opened. Surely that lead of 18, 000 is going to increase with a voting population of 64, 000. There are 25 boxes to check for Region 10 of which the APNU+AFC will collect a majority but that district has a voting number of 22, 000. In Region 4, there are (at time of writing yesterday) 364 boxes many of which are in PPP areas. So it leaves the question to be asked – with votes coming in for the PPP in Region 6 and Region 4, could the APNU+AFC acquire 75, 000 votes? Nagamooto has to answer that.
An intriguing part of the results of the recount numbers so far is the vote catch for the small parties. Let us look at Nagamootoo’s numbers in the Chronicle and in that compartment, you will see that the AFC did not bring anything to the PNC’s table. Cathy Hughes’s words at the AFC’s November 2019 press conference are haunting the PNC. Mrs. Hughes said the PNC never won an election on its own. The PNC went with a dead coalition partner and thus was on its own and thus lost the 2020 battle.
Here are the votes the small parties got according to Nagamooto. ANUG-2,288; Change Guyana-2,024; Liberty and Justice Party 2,263; People’s Republican Party -858; The Citizen Initiative-679; The New Movement-230; United Republican Party-394. The total is 8,754. The preachers of the fake ballots from the cemeteries and migrants need to ask Nagamootoo how those small parties were able to collect almost 9,000 votes.
Now that Mingo’s rotten mangoes were discovered in the recount, Nagamootoo’s ghost friends did a number on him. With a lead of 18, 000 so far by the PPP plus 7000 for the small parties from the recount so far, it is analytically simple to explain why the APNU+AFC lost.
Three factors are at work that explains the 2020 election result. First, those third party votes were the ballots that persons withdrew from the AFC in 2020 that they gave the AFC in 2011 and 2015. Secondly, the current lead by the PPP includes the votes that went to the AFC in 2011 and 2015. I repeat for the umpteenth time – the PNC could not have pulled it off because the PNC entered the election as essentially the PNC. Its coalition partner, AFC, had gone deep into the ground in the Le Repentir Cemetery.
Thirdly, mixed race citizens, Amerindians and undecided voters showed bitter annoyance at the APNU+AFC and decided to punish them. If you look at the APNU+AFC campaign six weeks before polling day, there was immense emphasis on Amerindian areas. Even the First Lady was drafted into the campaign because she appears to be partly Amerindian. That failed for the PNC because even though she is a fine, decent woman, the First Lady had no political experience whatsoever so her presence in Amerindian village were more formalistic than politically oriented. It did not translate into magic.
Finally, for the PNC to have won, the turnout had to be in the late seventies and early eighties. Nagamootoo in his Chronicle thing put it at 71 percent. That is extremely disappointing for a party that wrested power from the PPP and was the incumbent that was promising so much.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
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Apr 19, 2024
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