Rigging going corporate, free and fair in the septic tank

By GHK Lall- I’ll be absolute.  Most leaders, countless members, and numerous supporters of the PPP are clueless of what ‘free and fair’ means.  The same goes for their honesty about democracy.  They are entitled to speak of both as self-serving political commercials.  But they have discredited themselves through savaging free and fair, and disfiguring democracy in how WIN’s Azruddin Mohamed has been targeted, isolated, undermined, through one naked subterfuge after another. 

The PPP’s objective is to scorch the earth around him, starve him into submission by poisoning his oxygen supply.  In the fireworks, daggers, of political competition and political campaigning, I fully understand weakening an adversary, making him look most woeful.  But conscience dictates denunciation of how low the PPP has fallen at leadership, group, and individual levels relative to the political neophyte.  A couple of points now made reduce the PPP to the lowest denominator.  Lowest immoral denominator.  Lowest unethical denominator.  The hypocrite index is busted.  How craven can the PPP get?  Find out now.

There was a time when the same Azruddin Mohamed was the darling of the PPP from its leaders to its lamebrained.  No rehash should be necessary about the GRA, Italian luxury vehicles, and presidential fingerprints, as alleged.  Dirty water under a rickety bridge.  But he was the PPP main romantic interest back then, and it was damnation to hell for anyone who said differently, stood apart.  There are some Guyanese who could identify with such circumstances, as they pertain to the same Azruddin Mohamed now vilified and demonized by the PPP. 

Thanks to the power of the PPP leadership, as the party’s propagandists and defenders know, the leader of WIN could have moved the Guyana Police Force, from men with stars on their shoulders to others with stripes on their sleeves.  Thanks to the same PPP, the police is now unleashed against the same Mohamed, once the honeybunch of the party.  In the PPP world, he was an archangel with such associated powers; today he is the archdemon.  If people like me said a bad word against him back then, it was treason.  Today if I say what is being inflicted on him is wrong, that is subversion.  Democracy on a trapeze, anybody, any honorable PPP objector?

But the ruling party is nothing if not wily; one that doesn’t do anything by half measures, or without proper camouflage.  Enter the US.  Enter people in Guyana.  The Big Lady from America is on record as saying where the US stands with Mr. Mohamed and where those sanctions apply.  Does that matter?  Will there be a letup in the scurrilous actions taken here by local PPP beneficiaries and no-so-secret mercenaries?  No, there won’t be.  Elections are bigger than sanctions.  While sanctions serve as the best weapons to neutralize a threatening political contender. 

There are already those who have read what they want to read in the extent of the application of the US sanctions.  But there is also no shaking of the taint of PPP allies going to bat for it, giving the group a much-needed elections campaign hand.  Sanctions are these elections movers and shakers.  Sanctions have that power.  Sanctions are the PPP trump cards (no pun) in its efforts to shutdown Mohamed and WIN.  Limit US sanctions to their proper places and roles, and the ruling party sabotages its prospects.  Thus, the scaremongering and sanctions-baiting and witch-hunting.  Having been subjected to witch-hunts myself, there’s only contempt for male witches and their stunted, deformed broomsticks.  

Hence, I empathize with the embattled elections’ contestant, the political underdog that the PPP is trying so hard to convert forcibly (and through using any underhanded means) to a rabies-infected stray dog.  I certainly would never have imagined than a man like me could raise a pen, raise voice and word, for the cause of this new political dog that is anything but.  It is now beyond doubt that the PPP leadership is mortally afraid of his bark and his sting. 

It is why their own people go after him with take no prisoner’s viciousness (allowable in elections, once kept within bounds).  If that were all, I could say fair fight, forward march.  But the anxiety-infested PPP had to recruit its new phantom squad, unchain its private guerilla fighters to engage in irregular warfare under the flag of sanctions.  There is that rigging, and then there are the other kinds going on, coming to light.

Last, it’s almost mid-August.  I don’t know about voting, but I know this: there is incandescent anger when a man is taken advantage of, with piling on and piling on.  Therefore, when I note this pus from the PPP about free and fair and democracy in motion in Guyana’s elections, noxiousness seeps close.  I observe the total breakdown in spinal and testicular sturdiness.  I see donkeys pretending at civility, and pigs staking a claim to high principles.