I CAN remember it vividly. I was in the National Park removing some weeds from my shaggy dog when the phone rang. It was the morning of Friday, March 6. Norton called me to offer his views about the election fiasco.
I will not repeat what he said to me but it was indicative of the analytical mind he has.

I have always regarded two PNC leaders as politicians that can engage in intellectual discussions with plausible analytical output – Aubrey Norton and Vincent Alexander. Here is something about Norton that I always remember too. I think all, not most, but all Guyanese familiar with my activism know I come across as a relentless ferret.

In my student days at UG, Professor Clive Thomas warned me in his office about fighting every little, insignificant wrongs at UG. It was in his office too when he was a Minister, that Dr. Leslie Ramsammy suggested to me that I must not be a ferret picking on everything. But that is who I am so UG knew I was a ferret and therefore I would fight to have my say.

One day, Professor JOF Haynes came up to me when I was a lecturer alongside him in the same department and said he wants to do something but he knows I will put up a fight so he is asking for my consideration. Every lecturer at UG deferred to JOF because we all loved him. I had a special relation with JOF when we worked at UG plus he was a life-long customer at my mother-in-law’s supermarket.

If anyone who knows JOF’s wife, Cathy, please let me have her address and phone number. My wife and I would be glad to see her. My cell is 614-5927. I live at 47 Area Q, Turkeyen off UG Road, opposite the CARICOM Secretariat, across the road from Movie Towne. My email is fredkissoon@yahoo.com.

JOF indicated that he would like to change Norton’s grade to A from B because on re-reading it he thought the paper was brilliant. I agreed because I knew Norton was a bright student.

He has an analytical mind but Norton does not have a modest, political mind and it is this flaw that in August will see Norton’s ignominious exit from politics and society.

He will lose unless the election is tampered with and he will just fade away. When he rides away into the sunset, it will bring down the curtain on a political survivor with few parallels maybe except Bruce Golding from Jamaica and Ralph Maraj from Trinidad.

Brought up in politics in the youth arm of the PNC, the Young Socialist Movement, Norton climbed his way right up the ladder to achieve hierarchical status in the PNC when he became General-Secretary (GS) under Opposition Leader, Desmond Hoyte. There was a tempestuous quarrel between the two when Hoyte sacked Norton and publicly stated that the GS was “a creature of the leader.”

That did not result in the banishment of Norton. On the contrary, Norton remained embedded in the PNC’s leadership. When Robert Corbin took over from Hoyte, the quarrel with Corbin was far more tsunamic than with Hoyte. The dispute reached the court.

Norton fought two PNC leaders and survived; something you hardly find in politics anywhere in the world.
Ralph Maraj’s career was more colourful than Norton’s but Maraj, unlike Norton, did not have staying power in the two parties he had quarrels with (PNM and UNC), unlike Norton who fought his two leaders inside the PNC and remained a power-house in his organisation.

Norton, like Bruce Golding, but unlike Maraj, eventually became head of his party. Norton beat the former de facto president in the APNU+AFC government, Joseph Harmon and long-standing PNC stalwart, Basil Williams to become PNC leader. He was facing formidable opposition from the former president, David Granger, yet he pulled it off.

The apogee was achieved – Norton from YSM to PNC leader. But the flaw was inherent. Norton was a street fighter and street fighters do not make good, bureaucratic, diplomatic leaders. From day one, Norton moved from one egregious mistake to the other, with the sordid descent of refusing to shake the hand of the president.

No other PNC leader in the history of the PNC has faced so much consistent internal dissent as Norton faces at the moment. The closest was Hoyte when Raphael Trotman and Debra Backer drove Hoyte around the bend, and Norton, James McAllister and Vincent Alexander challenged Corbin.

There are about six well placed central committee members of the PNC that want Norton out. They are gunning for him and he will lose. More on the challenge facing Norton in an upcoming column.