Georgetown: The Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines Ralph Gonsalves who is the incoming CARICOM Chairman when asked to comment on Guyana’s electoral recount said “CARICOM is not going to tolerate anybody stealing an election.”
The Prime Minister of St Vincent will assume chairmanship of the 15-nation regional trade and integration bloc next month.
The recount shows that the PPP won the elections by over 15,000 votes.
He explained that CARICOM and its member-states will not associate with any government guilty of electoral fraud while urging that the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) declare the rightful winner of the March 2 elections as shown by the national vote recount.
“When you take part in an election, there is always a chance that you will lose, and if you lose, as Sir [Arthur] Lewis said ‘take your licks like a man’,” he declared during an interview on NCB radio in St Vincent.
During a radio programme, he urged GECOM to use those results to declare a winner since they are deemed to have been credibly produced.
“We expect the CARICOM observer mission to deliver its report and we expect that what is the recount would be honoured and the Guyana Elections Commission will honour that recount and declare the winner in accordance with this recount and anybody who then wants to challenge anything afterwards can go to court,” Gonsalves said.
Gonsalves, a seasoned politician who is in his fourth term as PM, knows about the position in which APNU has found itself.
“I know…anybody when they lose -they say so and so thief so and so thing. It is almost a boring repetition…,” Gonsalves stated.
The APNU+AFC is accused of allegedly conspiring with agents from the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) to rig the March 2 General and Regional Elections.
The CARICOM scrutinizing team comprises Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies (UWI), Ms Cynthia Barrow-Giles; Commissioner of the Antigua and Barbuda Electoral Commission, Mr John Jarvis; and SVG Deputy Supervisor of Elections, Mr Sylvester King.
Evidence suggests Returning Officer (RO) for Region Four Clairmont Mongo inflated the votes for the APNU+AFC by more than 19,000, and deflated the PPP’s vote by 4000 in his attempt to hand the Coalition a victory.
Mingo was caught attempting this on March 4 and again on March 13. The APNU+AFC has had two celebrations with their supporter since the fraudulent declarations.
After those figures were challenged in the High Court, President David Granger and Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo agreed to the CARICOM supervised recount.
Gonsalves had formed part of a four-member CARICOM Head-of-Government team which travelled to Guyana to broker the deal for the recount.
After the APNU+AFC candidate attempted to block it, Chair of CARICOM and PM of Barbados, Mia Mottley had contended that “…there are forced that do not want to see the votes recounted for whatever reason,” and CARICOM was forced to recall a high-level team it had sent to supervise that recount.
Speaking on behalf of the regional bloc, PM Mottley had also said that “any Government which is sworn in without a credible and fully transparent vote count process would lack legitimacy”.
CARICOM subsequently dispatched a second team and when the recount did commence, the APNU+AFC embarked on a campaign aimed at discrediting the elections by alleging that dead people and persons who were out of the country on Elections Day had voted.
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