Clearly, the electoral season is well on its way, even though VP Jagdeo insists that elections will not be scheduled until November 2025 — more than a year away.
But, in our political system, the Government have the option of calling “snap” elections at their discretion, once they comply with the regulations for electoral preparedness. Some believe the VP’s claim might be a feint to catch the opposition off-guard. Several reasons have been offered for early elections, the main one being the claimed disarray in the PNC camp following their just-concluded Congress, where Aubrey Norton was re-elected as their leader.
There were trenchant criticisms of the internal elections’ arrangements that led to Norton’s two challengers, Roysdale Forde and Amanza Walton-Desir, dropping out of the race, and not even showing up at the Congress.
The AFC’s credibility had suffered tremendously during its stint in the 2015-2020 coalition government with the PNC. They are now in a rebuilding and rebranding phase, following their Conference in which Nigel Hughes was elected leader and Raphael Trotman was elected General Secretary.
Another reason is the disagreement over these major Opposition parties’ electoral strategy after their coalition was dissolved with the end of their Cummingsburg Accord. The WPA, which have never achieved electoral relevance after receiving only a high of 2% of the votes in 1992, but helped broker the 2011 APNU formation with the PNC and three other paper parties, have again pushed a wider coalition. They have proposed a coalition in which they arrogated a place for themselves as the African-Guyanese “intellectuals” and Black Nationalists, and select a pre-election “consensual” leader who would be their presidential candidate because of our constitutional prohibition of post-elections’ coalitions.
There appears to be a wide assumption that Nigel Hughes would be best qualified to fill that position, and this has precipitated a wide debate in the Opposition on the role of class in African- Guyanese leadership in general, and the PNC in particular. When the PNC was formed, the League of Coloured People (LCP), led by John Carter, represented the presumptions of the Mixed Guyanese middle class, and their United Democratic Party (UDP) was one of the founding blocks. African-Guyanese like Burnham could aspire to this class through their education, speech, and other social capital, including “marrying up” in colour.
Nigel epitomises the present Mixed Guyanese middle class, and Norton the African Guyanese. Norton, however, rejected the notion of anyone being parachuted into the Opposition presidential candidate’s position: “I don’t believe that we should just take the hard work we do and give it to anybody who just flies off of a tree top, land on the ground and say you must be the presidential candidate.” He opined that as the largest block in any opposition grouping, any “consensual presidential candidate” must come from the PNC.
The last major source of uncertainty in strategy is over mobilization tactics. The WPA “intellectuals” reject the PPP’s approach, which is to now more explicitly court African-Guyanese voters to augment their traditional support in the Indian-Guyanese community, as “slave catchers”. They, of course, are referring to the historical role of those who captured Africans and sold them into slavery to the Europeans. They refer to African-Guyanese who join or work with the PPP as “house slaves”. These are very odious comparisons, and do not bode well for a national outlook. They provoke the retort that any attempt of the African-based opposition PPP, and now AFC, to attract Indian-Guyanese voters to give them the title of “Arkatis”. These were the individuals who promised prospective Indentured labourers in India that they were going to a “land of milk and honey”.
The game plans up to now, as adumbrated by Dr David Hinds, who has also announced that he is available to be an opposition “consensual candidate”, if for the PNC to garner the African-Guyanese votes as they have traditionally done; the AFC, with Nigel Hughes as Leader and Raphael Trotman as General Secretary, would garner the Mixed-race voters; and the WPA, with him, would gather the Black nationalist voters. They do not contemplate – as do the PPP with African-Guyanese voters – persuading many Indian-Guyanese to vote for the Opposition, but would take any brought in by ordinary executives like Mahipal (PNC) and Ramjattan (AFC) as “gravy”. This is a very divisive strategy for a nation with Indian-Guyanese constituting 39% of the populace.
