I READ this week from several news sources that Aubrey Norton feels confident that he can win the leadership of the PNC with ease at the upcoming national party congress.

I cannot predict the outcome of the internal party elections because people these days use strange metrics for voting for their party leaders. Oxford political scientist Eva Sorensen’s recent book on political leadership suggested modern typology of winning incumbent leadership styles.

The mediatisation of the leader and an interactive political leadership style are the two main driving factors to incumbency. This may explain why Donald Trump is easily declared the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party despite the mountains of performance issues. Donald Trump’s national performance issues may have no relation to party internal political performance and will require another set of analytical observations.

However, this typology may surely explain why Khemraj Ramjattan, for example, was returned as Party Leader at the last National Conference despite performing poorly on traditional political metrics in the AFC. He certainly, at the time, had a good mediatised thing going for him and interactivity was good enough.

An entire article may be needed to unpack the specifics. Traditional political leadership performance qualities are sometimes not necessarily on the forefront of the minds of voters. If we use Ramjattan as an example, party voters can observe that voting for party leadership based on considerations other than performance eventually end in failure. Under this tenure, AFC has withered to nothingness and will probably not make a dent on the electoral returns of the 2025 national and regional elections.

On the issue of traditional performance, according to the publicly known facts, Aubrey Norton has not made a dent. The hallmark of Norton’s leadership suggests that many party groups have fallen into dormancy and hardly any formation of new groups. Many party stalwarts have gone cold and youth morale are at its lowest.

Overseas chapters are in active non-cooperation with Norton. In fact, my sources have indicated that donation income to the party are comparably its lowest under Norton than any other person who has ever held the position as leader of the PNC.
As leader of the PNC, Norton is also Leader of the Opposition, a job at which he is most ineffective. A drive past the Office of the Leader of the Opposition will reveal a virtual ghost house.

Norton’s entire activism revolves around allegations of racial discrimination against the Ali-led government. When asked for concrete evidence, Aubrey fades into mere stutters of generalised clichéd allegations that do not even resemble reality.
So based on traditional political metrics, Norton is an abysmal failure as an incumbent leader. It is, therefore, difficult to visualise a scenario where Norton wins leadership based on performance.

Therefore, if Norton’s prospects are bleak given his performance track record, then we would have to invoke the academic explanations for why poor performing leaders get elected to national parties.

Norton has no particular appeal or romanticisation with the media in Guyana, not the traditional media, not social media. There is no sweet spot for Norton; if anything he has carved out particular positions of obscurity.

The next political quality that gets political leaders elected to party leadership is “an interactive political leadership style.” Here is where Norton fails most miserably: His recent shadow cabinet reshuffle was marred by so much controversy and accusations of non-consultation is only one example of a long list of woes that suggests that interactive leadership is foreign to Norton.

In totality, whether you use traditional layman’s performances metrics or recent academic analysis and the lack of robust activism on national issues, the prospects of Norton coming out as winner of the PNC leadership is next to zero.

That said, if we are to go by some of the accusations made within the party at recent congresses, there are strong suggestions that incumbent PNC leaders can find other ways around the fair ballot, so you never know. It is, therefore, difficult to predict whether Norton will be returned as Leader. One thing is sure though, if Norton is returned, the PNC in 2025 will perform poorer than it ever did in any elections in Guyana since independence, that’s my prediction.