Lies on top of lies make Satan smile

Jun 29, 2020 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

There is only one end-game which is possible when it comes to Guyana’s elections. Fraud will not be allowed to prevail.
The APNU+AFC and their agents are putting on a last-stand pantomime. But they know that they will not be allowed to assume office through fraud. If they did not know it before, they know it now.
What the APNU+AFC is doing is buying time. They are buying time to clean-up and cover-up their misdeeds. They are buying time to be able to complete certain transactions on behalf of their rich handlers; they are buying time to find ways to conceal some of what was done so that it cannot be traced back to them and their cronies.
Two decades have passed in the 21st century. And during those two decades, no government has gotten away with electoral banditry. Guyana is not going to be the exception. Those persons within the APNU+AFC, who may have been living in the past, have been brought back to reality both by the local, regional and international rejection of their crookery.
The CCJ’s case is irrelevant to the outcome of the elections. Win or lose, the decision about the elections rests with GECOM. And GECOM will not be able to foist an illegal regime upon the country. David Granger knows that he will never again be the President of Guyana.
His underlings know it too. They are being confronted with the implications of their own lies. Once you begin to lie, you have to continue lying. One lie leads to another. The APNU+AFC is caught in a big lie,  and that lie has had to be sustained to the point where it makes the liars looks like idiots.
The first lie was that the APNU+AFC had won the elections. The Statements of Poll confirming this could not be produced. The second lie was that the recount would confirm the victory. Knowing that this was a lie, a third lie was manufactured; that the PPP/C rigged the elections.
When persons pointed to the contradiction of the PPP/C rigging the elections to hand the Coalition a victory and, knowing that the recount would establish the lies which were being pedaled by the APNU+AFC, the narrative switched to questioning the elections’ credibility. This was the fourth lie.
It was hoped that the Caricom Audit Team would have been deceived by the numerous baseless allegations of dead people voting, migrant persons voting and missing documents. The APNU+AFC seemed to have overlooked that the Team had experience in electoral matters. They saw right though the masquerade which the Coalition had launched.
The APNU+AFC was hoping that the Caricom Team would have given it a lifeline to discredit the elections and thus remain in office until new elections were held. The Coalition did not wish to risk having the Carter Center here and so they used all manner of poor excuses to deny their return for the recount.
The Caricom Team was not fooled by the Coalition’s theatrics. In its report, the team described the allegations of fraud levelled by the APNU+AFC as follows:
“The team viewed much of the exercise as a fishing expedition designed to gather data for a possible election petition and which resulted in considerable time being wasted during the recount. Furthermore, the net was cast extremely wide in the hope of at least making a small catch and at times the anticipated harvest ended in slim pickings.”
In relation to the missing documents from ballot boxes – an issue which the APNU+AFC is hanging onto as a lifeline – the team said it did not view these  fatal to the recount but pointed to the need for it to be  investigated.
The Coalition was so confident that Caricom would hand it a lifeline that after the recount showed that it had lost, it held out that the process was not yet complete since the report of the Caricom Team had not yet been submitted.
When it was submitted, the APNU+AFC got what we Guyanese would say was a “shock-attack”.  It smothered any hopes the Coalition has of discrediting the elections on the grounds of fraud. As such, it has had to resort to new lies.
The latest lie is the manufactured numbers declared by the Chief Elections Officer. The elections are no longer not credible. They are now deemed credible because the Chief Elections Officer, by some magical process and unknown authority, has arrogated to himself the right to invalidate votes cast and certified as valid. The same elections which the APNU+AFC said was discredited have now produced a credible result: an APNU+AFC victory.
If that is not idiocy, then Santa Claus is real. What is real is the action which the international community is going to take against those who feel that they can steal an election.
The lies of the APNU+AFC are piling up on top of each other. Satan is smiling.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)