Claudette Singh: The 2020 election and the Region 5 mayhem

Sep 13, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

It was bound to happen. The PNC (not so much the AFC since it hasn’t got constituencies) for five months sermonized their supporters with the song of being cheated in a PPP manipulated election. After burying their supporters for five months in a nightmare of torrential hallucinations, they themselves were overcome by vendetta instincts.
They simply used a mundane incident of homicide to do two things – satisfy their lacerated psyche by creating bestial mayhem and instilling in their constituencies that they must fight to destabilize a government that is not legal. There is a direct connection between the length of time the rigging was allowed to go on – five months – and the PNC’s opportunity to use the Region 5 double homicide as incitement to race hate.
We look at what happened in Region 5 and its direct link with the election nightmare and names come to mind. Claudette Singh heads the list. If she has digested the lessons of the Region 5 tragedies, then she should reflect on her own faults in allowing the nastiness to drag out for five months.
Once Mingo’s caricatured tabulation hit the eyes of the world, Singh and the rest of Guyana should have insisted that it be brought to an end. From March 4, the PNC, AFC, its surrogates like university lecturers, trade unionists, newspaper columnists in both the Chronicle and the Stabroek News, the three PNC commissioners among others fed the frustrations of PNC voters and did so for five months.
The moral thing to do was to explain to them that they lost but they will ensure the PPP govern responsibly and fairly and for Singh to conduct the business of GECOM in such a way that would have made it difficult for the PNC+AFC’s mischief to spread. Singh did not do this. She acted after five months and in so doing, the genie got out of the bottle.
Whether it was a double homicide in Region 5 or a killing of an African Guyanese in some remote village in Guyana’s interior that the average Guyanese never heard about, Harmon, Granger and the Freudian degenerates in the AFC had to instigate racial hostilities. But the circumstances determine the magnitude of the conflagration.
A heinous murder of an African Guyanese in one of the more obscure parts of Guyana could not have been manipulated the way Granger and Harmon did in Region 5. The double homicide fell into the lap of a desperate party frenetically looking for something to destabilize Guyana. There are legitimate questions that are now swirling around Georgetown (maybe the entire Guyana).
Was it a random murder that the PNC zeroed in on to create a race war to ensure it has a place at the post-violence settlement? Some theories making the round are that it could have been unmitigated vengeance by drug people who the cousins had a falling out with. Another theory is that it was an invention by political opportunists in the leadership of the PNC and AFC as the beginning of a protracted war of “mo fyah, slo fyah.”
This is a cynical interpretation because it implies that the cousins were indispensible. There are definitely bogus stories out there that even crazy derelicts who sleep on the streets would not buy. For example, why would Indian people kill two youths as an act of race hate knowing that their party won the election and their party is ruling and that such brutality will bring vendetta upon the PPP?
I simply do not buy that, and I am rejecting that perspective. Look what happened. It almost turned into a race riot. Surely, the Indians who were supposed to do that cannot be that stupid. If the boys were murdered in gang warfare and the PNC used it for an ugly power grab or the boys were sacrificed to create a race war, it has not worked out but it has thrown the spotlight back on Singh. One must remember at all times, it did not work because the PPP did not encourage their constituencies to retaliate.
Looking back, Singh could have prevented the volcano from erupting this month if she had done the right thing in March. It seems that a precarious calm is settling in Region 5 but the placidity may not reach the hearts of some PNC and AFC leaders. They may still be interested in fanning the flames of “slo fyah mo fyah.” What an ironic country! Who would have believed that when Khemraj Ramjattan and Moses Nagamootoo were victims of “slo fyah, mo fyah” in 1997, they would be involved in inciting a race war 23 years after.
(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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