IT was July 26, 2015 at the Safaricom Indoor Arena in Nairobi, Kenya where US President, Barack Obama, spoke to a packed stadium, an event which was televised live and became history’s most watched speech on the continent of Africa.

Obama intoned: “A politics based solely on tribe and ethnicity is a politics that is doomed to tear a country apart, it is a failure – a failure of imagination.”
This statement is a powerful statement of caution to Guyanese opposition politicians.

Opposition politics has descended into single issue activism. As you read think back over the recent past, have you heard anything else coming out of the opposition other that talks and accusations of racial discrimination?

I am not referring to those fringe matters that flare up from time to time and get treated as peripheral issues. I am referring to the opposition’s sustained core issue over time. It’s a one-horse pony.

The opposition sees race in everything, there is race relations even in the daily sunshine. This approach to politics worked very well in the past. When this issue was coupled with corruption, the dual platform rallied many across the country and might have been one of the chief reasons why the PPP/C lost government in 2015.

Several officials of the PPP, including Vice President Jagdeo, admitted that the PPP/C was complacent with its handling, messaging and general response to allegations and might have dropped the political ball, leading to increased disillusionment with the PPP/C government.

As such, the opposition coalition capitalised on this low morale and swept into power with high expectations of unearthing massive corruption and correcting widespread discrimination.

The coalition rapidly lost popularity as they were unable to provide any credible evidence of corruption or a single tangible policy for racial affirmative action while in power. People soon realised that there is a difference between salacious accusations and presentation of materials with evidential value; the collation was placed squarely back in the benches of the opposition.

Now that the smoke and mirrors regarding corruption have been removed, the opposition latched on to deeply-held historical ethnic fears to continually drum up allegations of racial discrimination.
Abraham Lincoln succinctly prosed that, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”

This is the quagmire of the APNU+AFC coalition. People are realising day by day that they are being fed a lot of empty political calories. This is causing membership and general support attrition among traditional ethnic voting blocs.
We need not look any further than the 2023 Local Government Elections (LGE) for some evidence.

Areas where PPP was previously unable to even find lists of candidates much less muster seats have made notable shifts to the PPP/C. This was a nationwide pattern in PNC/R strongholds. The results of LGE 2023 do not represent social polling or political expectation and analysis; it also does not represent social media following.

Instead, it represents real ballot box support for the PPP in places where none existed in the past. These are newly converted voters that did not exist at any elections prior to 2023.
Though LGE2023 was a low turnout affair, the trends are clear, the PPP gained an average of over 12 per cent voter conversion in hardcore PNC/R strongholds such as South Georgetown, including Agricola.

The PPP picked up new votes in Mocha Arcadia, New Amsterdam, Linden and other areas in several other regions including Region Seven. For argument’s sake let’s temper this number for the upcoming 2025 General Election; assuming that many areas that are not part of the LGE demarcations have no shifts. Also, with a bigger General Election turnout, we can also assume that new PPP vote gains has a threshold and the PNC support base can overwhelm it.

Sticking with the trends already observed in the LGE areas, this will essentially wither the 12 per cent voter shift to about eight per cent. Using Coalition returns of 218,000 at the 2020 General Elections, that will represent 17,000 votes. A hemorrhage of 17,000 votes will account for two or more seats shifting to the PPP/C.

APNU is currently suffering from the “failure of imagination” debacle. On the part of the APNU, its supporters and cheerleaders, they have to evolve from the current monotonic messaging of racism and discrimination. Clearly this strategy is unimaginative, overworked and unappealing even to its own supporters.