The Associated Press  quoted Assistant Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas in an article titled “Guyana Officials stay nearly twenty years in mandates.” Westmaas discussed the country’s failure to hold municipal elections for nearly 20 years.

“There is something within the Guyanese society that allows for tolerance. We become complacent to a plague of mediocrity,” he explained. “(It is) a collective embarrassment that democracy at the crucial level of the community has gone unfulfilled for so long, and that foreign diplomats have to provide pressure for something so logical and necessary.”

Published on March 1, the article appeared in many news outlets including The Washington Post.