Dear Editor,
The PNC is dead. Long live the PNC. As Hoyte did in 1992, Aubrey Norton repeated the show of its party’s resilience on Sunday evening with a huge turnout at its 2025 elections campaign launch at the Square of the Revolution. It must trouble the PPP/C that for all its confidence from endorsements from recent members of the APNU/PNC, from several cash grants with promises of more to come, from the convenient attendance of tens of thousands of part-time workers at its events, and the demonising of David Hinds, that the PNC-R, or APNU could attract such a crowd.
Regardless of what many thought and still do of Norton, he is the leader of a huge segment of the population that the PPP/C sees as a commodity open to transaction, provided they stay in their place. Treat Norton with disrespect and you disrespect all the 217,920 persons who voted for the PNC and their young children who have now reached voting age. The word is that Norton has his own autocratic inclination but one thing for sure, the Government will not be run from Congress Place.
Norton’s choice of Juretha Fernandes, a young Amerindian woman from Bartica, the holder of a BSc in Economics and MSc in Public Administration as his prime ministerial candidate, is an inspired choice for many reasons – gender, ethnicity, substance, competence, independence and integrity. By contrast, PM Mark Phillips is appointed with an unmountable dark-tinted glass ceiling placed before him, with its own shade of racism. In fact, even as the constitutionally prescribed first Vice President, the PM struggles to make it into the inner cabinet of five.
Fernandes immediately placed on the front burner the relentless rise in the cost of living over the past four years to which the Government’s only response were periodic cash grants rather than adequate management. It appears that the PPP/C fails to realise that without other measures, cash grants drive the cost of living higher still.
It was also good to hear that the Ticket will act on the Access to Information Act, a fundamental pillar of democracy and good governance, another guardrail torn down by the PPP/C. Addressing this pillar will make the society more open, more democratic and more vibrant.
The Ticket made some expansive promises on Sunday night, premised on higher petroleum revenues. The Ticket will need to rely on more than production. Guyanese need to hear from Norton and Fernandes whether they are committed to holding a commission of inquiry into the 2016 Agreement as a prelude to its renegotiation.
The PPP/C might be glad that the two main speakers did not raise the issue of the 2016 Agreement for which Bharrat Jagdeo before the PPP/C took office in 2020 had used the words “they sold us out”. The only thing that has changed is that Jagdeo has gone from being a critic of the Agreement, which lasts until the late 2050’s, to being an enabler. Yet, Exxon, Hess and CNOOC have begun taking money out of Guyana. Jagdeo and Ali no longer seem to care that the so-called profit share from oil is barely enough to pay the very taxes owed by the oil companies themselves, and to build the roads and infrastructure needed for those same companies to extract our most precious economic asset.
However, the PPP/C might care to respond to the Launch, it showed that Norton leads a party and a Ticket that has the capacity to organise, mobilise and galvanise its support base. The consolidation of those constituencies represented by Norton, Fernandes, Hinds and others will pose a serious headache for the PPP/C. It might even have to wonder about the point about all those handouts, cash grants and ribbons cutting.
Then it faces a challenge from Azruddin Mohammed, scion of a wealthy Muslim family. From financier to political competitor and rival for the presidency, young Mohammed has created a buzz – which maybe only Walter Rodney ever matched – potentially shaving votes from two historically solid PPP constituencies disillusioned by the status quo – the Muslims and the Amerindians.
That is a headache which the PPP can ill afford. Its response in having its supporters and part-time workers disrupt Mohamed’s meetings in the presence of an unresponsive Police is counter-productive and dangerous. The last thing Guyana needs now is even the suspicion implicating the PPP/C in political violence, such as the Mon Repos market incident.
As other issues regarding the PPP/C’s management are placed under the microscope, such corruption, the gas to energy project, its treatment of NIS retirees, and landowners whose property has been acquired at well below market price, the political tide will ebb and flow.
In Guyana we always think that our politics is unique. Yet, the words of former British Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson that “A week is a long time in politics”, seem to apply with dramatic force to Guyana.
Sincerely,
Christopher Ram