Rigging is in the air. Rigging in the hair. It’s that thick, that slick. Rigging is in the ear. It penetrates deep, upsets ambience, disturbs balance. Rigging is in the blood, the mud and the cud chewed. It is rigging with a difference, and mostly in plain sight. It is rigging that is not so nuanced anymore, so contemptuous the master riggers have become of the masses; or of making a mistake. Rigging in new forms, rigging like worms. This calls for social media saturation. I’m ready.
Need a rigging job? Interested Guyanese don’t have to take the trouble of traveling 120 miles offshore. All it takes to get a rigging job is walk 120 yards (meters) from Big Market to the big rigging house on Robb Street. Wrong, as usual: it is not Stabroek News. It’s Freedom House, the house of the arrangers, orchestrators, and conductors of the 2025 Rigging Band. Riggin for Livin’, Riggin for Winning. In this 2025 AD, there is the unprecedented in Guyana’s elections. It is not PNC rigging. Welcome to the world of PPP rigging. This is not about the crudity of spreadsheets and stuffed ballot boxes. Why fool around, do all that heavy lifting, when there is the master helper and bricklayer, GECOM. Stuffing ballot boxes is more ancient than Stone Age elections’ warriors. There is GECOM with its stuffed lists, which also revels to the name of bloated banditry. For those who are more modern and technologically minded, there were the Mingo spreadsheets of old, and there are the GECOM bedsheets of today. Spreadsheets were about who was at the side of whom five years ago. Bedsheets-stained and soiled and telling their own story-are of who is in bed with whom today. Stuffed. Bloated. Corpulent. Is that voters list, with all those 757,715 bodies on it a long, endless bedsheet or what? Longer than 83,000 square miles. Larger with the national and electoral bed that is now overloaded to the point of collapsing.
The cries were loud and long in 2020. David Granger allegedly up to his neck in attempts at rigging. From what I could have gathered, he had a neck longer than a swan and a giraffe combined. The objectors and observers today are not talking about PNC rigging. Not a phrase, not one l’il syllable about PNC, or APNU, or AFC, or WPA rigging. It is all PPP rigging. In need of an ID card? Don’t waste time going to GECOM. Come to the PPP, which has its own ID factory and machinery all lined up and busy churning them out. Business is bright; three shifts, including weekends and even Emancipation Day, with the PNC distracted. The PNC celebrates; the PPP creates. Call for international elections’ observers, and they come flying from specially selected parts of the Commonwealth. Do you hear what I hear? Not, it’s not Xmas. It’s Brook Benton and “These are the ties that bind…” I know about the Muslim Brotherhood, but never knew of those newfound subcontinent siblings. I must check that out, for there may be some family in that big contingent. Of visitors and standby voters. As proof of their presence and residence, they are allowed to take out a cellphone selfie and send it to all the way back to Dhaka or Ole Delhi, maybe even as far as Rawalpindi. Don’t worry, famlee! I am safe and sound with the PPP (GECOM) family. It’s a selfie with a unique feature: in the corner, right above the left shoulder, there is a piece of paper with a big, unmistakable X. I almost forgot to say that that phone selfie has two scheduled stops to make. The first is at Freedom House, and the second is a courtesy call at Office of the President. There is casting the ballot, and there is providing confirmation.
GECOM wouldn’t be GECOM if it didn’t engage in CYA (covah yah bum-bim). Take a picture in the voting booth, and be ready to take a walk. There’s a jail booth waiting. This is a real comedy country starting with GECOM. The PPP loved to talk about PNC rigging. The PNC should make a mountain of de PPP riggin GECOM. For those seeking an imbalance of numbers, try GECOM. Imbalance in structure and voting power. Imbalance in listings. If GECOM was the Titanic, an iceberg wouldn’t be required to do damage. The weight of GECOM’s overweight list alone would sink it. One last stanza of PPP rigging is necessary. Venezuelans. Maduro send them, the PPP welcome them. It’s border controversy and US sanctions converted by the PPP to its electoral advantage. Because of elections, I make an exception. Facebook here I come. It’s to increase and inspire my PPP following about PPP-style rigging: In the face and below the waist.
