The Electoral Reform Group is a devious organism

Jun 02, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – What follows below are brief notes as a reaction to Mr. Alfred Bhulai’s letter on me in relation to my criticism of the Electoral Reform Group (ERG) – (Kaieteur News, May 31), and Dr. Desmond Thomas’ missive on me (Kaieteur News, May 28). Both men are in the leadership of the ERG.
Let’s deal with Mr. Bhulai’s piece first because in a large way it shows both the sadness and deviousness of people in this country making a workable future for courageous leadership extremely difficult. In my column of Tuesday May 18 captioned, “Election reform project: The dead, the silent, the shameless,” I dealt with the silence of the ERG on the five-month election rigging.
Mr. Bhulai has now boldly admitted on behalf of his organisation that rigging was taking place for five months. But it is not simple as what the reader thinks. First, the date of the admission is important. May 28 of 2021 is the first time since its birth in July 2020 that the ERG has stated that it accepts that the election was tampered with.
Why did it have to take an accusation from me for the ERG to do what any decent, patriotic citizen expects of it? Secondly, it is more than strange that the ERG normally attaches the signatures of more than 10 names of its leaders when it publishes its newspaper letters. On Friday, just two days before Bhulai’s missive appeared, there was a correspondence in the Stabroek News about election reform by the ERG and signed by 10 of its leaders.
Why two days after another missive is printed by ERG and this time it accepts that the March election was being tampered with but the correspondence carried only one signature? Here is what I believe happened. The leaders in their individual capacity will not put their signatures to a publication describing the election as fraud perpetrated by the GECOM Secretariat, APNU GECOM Commissioners and APNU+AFC.
What happened then is that Bhulai volunteered. If anyone should ask the nine other leaders why they did that, the response would be obvious, “Bhulai said that, not me.”
We come to the founding leader of the ERG, Dr. Desmond Thomas. He responded to my column of May 24 in which I bemoaned again the absence of a statement from the ERG. There is not even one word in Dr. Thomas’ reply that was assigned to what happened in the 2020 election. The gentleman avoids discussion of the rigged March 2020 election like the Ebola virus.
Here is an interesting part of Dr. Thomas’ missive in which he gets personal with me, Mr. Kissoon’s ad hominem comments are disappointing coming from an established media voice, raising questions about his motives and how genuinely interested he is in finding solutions to our delicate social and political problems.”
Is this the same Dr. Thomas who shares a collegial relation in another organisation with someone who during the five months of election tampering openly supported the fraud, who illegally acquired state lands and had to be evicted by state authorities and who is before the courts on criminal charge for assaulting a woman half his size?
I would like to think Dr. Thomas should first question the motives of people he shares a civil society relationship with than selecting me in the first instance. I do not share a collegial relationship with Dr. Thomas; thus, he has no obligation to me to remain silent on what he considers my questionable motives. But he has an obligation to that gentleman to ask him about his behaviour.
I have been around too long not to spot the nature of people like Dr. Thomas. They come in large numbers, are of ephemeral passing and when they fail to become numero uno in Guyana; we hear no more of them. Let us now expose the conspiratorial ways Dr. Thomas argues in the hope he can deceive Guyanese who he thinks may not be intellectually developed to detect his slippery, scheming, disingenuous modus operandi.
Here are the words of Dr. Thomas, “it is disingenuous to suggest that March 2020 is the yardstick to measure the role, legitimacy or credibility of any person or group who may seek to bring improvements to an obviously broken system… agitation on election issues did not start in 2020.” What Dr. Thomas is saying here is unadulterated nonsense.
Whatever depravities happened in the past that we spoke up against does not exonerate us from denouncing the very depravities that are heaped on Guyana in the present time. This is a barefaced attempt by Dr. Thomas to mask his silence on the election rigging. Really, Dr. Thomas, who are you?
(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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