OPINION: GECOM seating: restart with head in the right place

Last Updated on Sunday, 1 February 2026, 17:49 by Writer

By GHK Lall

The first area of disagreement between the PNC and WIN teams has been over the three seats on GECOM. Parliament followed with some hiccups over time to contribute to the Budget debates, but at a milder level to date. I believe that this could be a bone of contention going forward. This jostling for space, this pushing and shoving about who has a bigger right, and the first right, to speak for opposition voters, and to a lesser degree Guyanese in general.

As supported in another contribution, the PNC’s position of proportionality has merit, may be the best way ahead in a sticky situation. I, too, think that there’s a right to speak on behalf of Guyanese, though no one voted for me, though there’s no seat for me, not even in the public square. I think that the same standard of proportionality should be put to work relative to who gets to place how many commissioners at GECOM.

There are three seats presently occupied by PNC commissioners. In 2020, that brooked neither discussion nor argument. From September 1, 2025, the opposite now holds true. My position is clear: a formula should be worked out among the three opposition parties, so that reseating reflects the will of voters, as captured in the final results of Elections 2025. A simple one is what I have worked out.

WIN has 16 seats, or 55% of the 29 seats allocated to the opposition. The APNU-PNC has 12 seats for a 41% share. The single seat attached to FGM is all of three percent of the 29 to the opposition. WIN may have some ideas about how much its 55% share of seats should signify, i.e., one and a half seats. I don’t. The PNC may be adamant that it is due more than one seat, with which I will not argue. But how to go about parceling out a fractional seat is beyond my level of mathematics, anatomy, and biology. It seems that Guyanese find themselves in that unhappy position of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. A pound of flesh is desired. How to get it correct to the most painfully excruciating microgram, and with absolute accuracy, that’s the challenge. I haven’t forgotten, or discarded, the one-seat wonder, FGM, from either the conversation or the division. FGM’s single seat is three percent of the 29 within the opposition domain. A whole lot of Guyanese would say, with some basis, that FGM is out, not due anything. I share where I stand, which is sure to be disliked by all, applauded by none.

In the spirit of cooperation that the WIN leader broke ground to appeal to contemporaries, I humbly recommend that this group and leader settle for one seat, because of the inordinate and insurmountable difficulty to deliver half of a body to GECOM, and put that mummy (or dummy) in a chair. The same recommendation is advanced to the 12-seat PNC. Hopefully, that in a push for consensus, and avoidance of the spectacle of an opposition cohort that can’t see straight, can’t think straight, and can’t walk straight, and with one head and voice, that it also settles for a single GECOM seat. On the side, I think that the Opposition PNC and its three commissioners sitting at GECOM should already have done the decent thing, the right thing, the honorable thing and relinquished those seats. For the people. For a new standard. Towards a new beginning. I return to the opposition and GECOM seats, and there’s FGM and its three percent holding relative to the 29 seats.

It would be a most magnanimous gesture on the part of both the WIN and the PNC leaderships and teams to make the sacrifice and give the remaining seat to FGM. If I recall well, there is still some hard feelings about a seat in Houston that wasn’t properly allocated (or relinquished) from over 60 years ago. There have been others since then that have generated the same controversies, the same residual bad blood that never fails to wound this country and its peoples. With WIN, the PNC, and FGM each having one seat, GECOM then has a fair representation of Guyana’s voters. Further, this stricken and suffocation nation gets to see that its elected can engage in the give-and-take that makes for the best advocacy, circumstances and limitations considered. What’s the alternative? If concessions are not made, then stalemate takes over.