Dear Editor,
The least surprising alliance in Guyanese political history took place when we had Azruddin Mohamed’s comically titled We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) team up with Dr Mark Defrance’s A New and United Guyana (ANUG) last weekend. Instead of a press event, even a limited one like that of Amanza Walton on the launch of her own coalition, the signing ceremony was held secretly during the day on Saturday, a press release on it having taken place was sent out in the pre-dawn hours of the morning, and the next day the two signatories were out of press range in an outreach in the interior.
The ANUG-WIN coalition has since then come up with all the obfuscations, deflections and gaslighting that anybody observing the two men for the past months could have expected. Before they even started, you had the clip art logo from Mohamed that was a jaguar, then a leopard, and then a jaguar when he was caught saying it was a jaguar, and then finally a letter of apology to the same GECOM he had threatened legal action against, admitting that he had inadvertently called it a jaguar but it was really a leopard.
In teaming up with Dr Defrance, Mohamed seems to have found his smarter, more slippery, but still as obvious partner in duplicity. After months of representing no policy positions for ANUG, of engaging in no political outreaches, of not so much as updating the party’s Facebook page despite him writing libraries worth of Facebook posts and comments in support of Azruddin, the ANUG Chair finally signed off on a ‘secret’ deal to enter a coalition.
Even with this coalition agreement, both men are insisting on calling a jaguar a leopard, referring to their coalition as a “collaboration” – as if Guyanese are stupid. Under the law, once two parties come together with a shared list and still retain their individual party structure, that is a coalition. The reason why they don’t want to call it what it is, is twofold.
First, Azruddin is a man that likes sticking to his story, no matter what evidence you bring up to contradict it. Therefore, since he was caught clearly stating that he was not coalescing with any party because he could win the elections on his own, for him to now coalesce with ANUG would be to contradict himself and expose what is well known – he is struggling to get candidates on his own and had to settle with the only small party desperate and unscrupulous enough to risk sanctions by teaming up with him.
As for the craftier Defrance, he knows that saying openly that he had entered ANUG into a coalition with the OFAC-sanctioned Azruddin would not only expose him to sanctions himself – and likely already has. Calling a coalition a collaboration will not fool the American authorities.
To enter into a coalition with Azruddin also contradicts Defrance’s own supposedly ethical postures. Just a few weeks ago, as Chair of ANUG, Defrance charged GECOM with adhering to standards of transparency, integrity and accountability.
In keeping with that spirit, Defrance has to explain to the public that if it is true that ANUG was starved of resources up to last week, as evidenced by the fact that he and his executive have had no public outreaches for the entire year, how did he and several of his executives suddenly get the resources to go on a political outreach to the interior?
The Representation of the People’s Act obligates the single list, not the constituent partners of a coalition, to report its expenses – How is Defrance accounting for ANUG’s financial involvement on that single list with Mohamed, particularly with regard to verification of the sources of list funds?
He also has to, in the spirit of transparency, directly address how many members of ANUG, already a skeleton crew party, have sent in their resignations in the wake of his coalition with WIN. Who exactly are the ANUG members, other than himself, who would be signing on to the coalition with Mohamed as presidential candidate?
As for Mohamed, every single time he opens his mouth to speak to the media directly, he further indicts himself and his integrity. When he was last at court on the tax evasion charges, he claimed without any evidence to support it that he had a poll conducted of 80,000 respondents, about one-tenth of the entire population of Guyana and about one-seventh of the electorate, and that 65 per cent of those people said they would vote for him. If that were true, that would be the largest election poll in the history of global politics.
Defrance, in contrast, has predicted that the PPP, being the best party at this time to run the country, would win the elections but that his intention was to provide them with a minority executive. How are the two reconciling these vastly different predictions?
Then there is the issue of policy and integrity. Early on the morning of the day of the release of the NGSA results, last week, you had Mohamed with his teleprompter stating clearly that education was in a crisis and spiral. Nothing could be further from the truth, yet the video in which Mohamed spoke with his full chest about a non-existent crisis and downward spiral in primary education is still on his page with over 238,000 views.
Dr Defrance, the clearly more educated of the two, instead praised the historical achievement and congratulated Priya Manickchand on her consistent high performance in the education sector. When confronted not just about the contradiction in their perspectives on the education system but about the clear dishonesty in his coalition partners’ statement, Defrance predictably runs away.
The secret coalition signing ceremony, the four-day morning press release, and then the running off into the interior are not a bug of the ANUG-WIN coalition; they are a feature. For Defrance, hyperactive on social media, whenever he faces a tough question on one forum, he immediately runs to another. When he is caught up there, he runs to another forum.
Azruddin is even more evasive. His social media engagement is the most ironically contradictory. Both Team Mohamed’s and We Invest in Nationhood are plural in title but focus exclusively on one man. That man, however, does not have his own social media identity and never engages directly. On the two occasions that he engaged with the media, ten minutes did not pass before he got flustered and had to be shielded by some protector. In the first instance, when he was giving his 65 per cent support comment, when questions about the sanctions and the tax evasion charges became too hard, he was whisked away by his lawyer. When Trinidadian journalist Ian Alleyne (who he notably invited to an interview while running from the local media the day after the coalition signing) pressed him about the same thing, Alleyne was aggressively confronted by Mohamed’s supporters as he himself was whisked away by his ‘campaign manager’ Odessa Primus.
Both men continue to prove themselves the cowardly, mediocre and entirely inconsistent pity-po’-boys of Guyanese politics, two insipid peas in a pod of self-delusion, all ego and bluster on social media but deathly afraid of the press for even basic scrutiny.
I am calling on Azruddin Mohamed and Mark Defrance to man up and have the courage to hold a press conference where they open themselves up to direct questions from the media.
The time for running and hiding behind skirt tails every time the questions get too uncomfortable is over. I told a drinking buddy of mine that I was going to issue this challenge to the dodgy duo, and his response was, “They gun mek it, man.” Let’s see.
