OWING to our historical evolution as a nation, race and politics have become inextricable. Literally, every political matrix must factor in “the race question” in significant ways, if they are to be taken seriously by the electorate.

It needs to be a normal and most rudimentary part of typical political calculations. The first calculation Guyanese make is directly linked to their ethnic visual-sensory receptors, or “how it ah look”.

In other words, any political party hoping to receive wide national support must first and foremost appear to be racially diverse before even uttering a word. Therefore, significant forethought, energy, resources, planning and groundwork must be centered on presenting an ethnically diverse team to the public.

In this regard, the Opposition is missing the mark over and over and over. In all of Guyana’s history I’ve not read or heard of a catchment of political parties, either singular or as a group, so ethnically one- dimensional, as the current opposition. Because the ethnic factor is so unavoidably ubiquitous, and a dominant feature of our political psychology, it must naturally mean that that is the way the political principals want it to be or that forms the guiding core principles of the party.

The Working Peoples’ Alliance (WPA) recently announced that it has formally selected (emphasis on the word selected not elected) a new group of leaders and has also named a presidential candidate. An examination of the ethnic nomenclature of the WPA’s new leadership team reveals that it is one dimensional, almost all black men.
This is a tell-tale sign that the WPA of today is uninterested in becoming a party of national appeal.

The WPA has now joined the AFC with an all-male, all-black leadership cast. The PNCR is not far removed. Each of the other parties inside of the APNU outfit are almost exclusively black in their leadership slates.
The combined opposition has one guiding philosophy, consolidation of African Guyanese support base and African domination of the levers of power, there is not even an ounce of pretense.

To the normative political question, “how it guh look,” the collective opposition just don’t care about the optics and have little or no appreciation for the significant role racial and other forms of diversity play in the political permutations of the nation.

This lack of ethnic sensitivity places the PPP/C as the only (and most) ethnically diverse party. The opposition’s act of continually accusing the PPP of practicing racial discrimination is more of a reflection of their own narrow ethnic representative interests than anything else.

In a previous article I accused the opposition of riding a one-horse pony, narrowing their major activities to afro-centric activism while treating other national issues as peripheral. This has rendered the opposition impotent when it comes to reaching across the political divide, serving instead as purveyors of division.

Since returning to office in 2020, the PPP/C was deliberate about breaching the ethnic political divisions by reaching out to non-traditional communities. There are numerous political calculations that the PPP/C has made to overcome its past deficit in handling the ethnic question. Consequently, the PPP/C is the only visibly growing party; growing in ethnic diversity at all levels.

This has already begun to pay dividends at the ballot box. The story of inroads into the opposition support base in the 2023 Local Government Elections is not from Anancy, its real. I heard members of the opposition making claims of resounding victory in certain LGE areas even though the results clearly show that they lost seats in their traditional Afro based constituencies.

The opposition is happy, because they are contented to consolidate support in a narrow ethnic corridor. Just as their leadership structure suggest, they didn’t even bother to attempt to field candidates in areas with majority non-African ethnic composition.

In fact, the current structure of each of the cooperating opposition parties is designed to dip from the same ethnic support pool. Any talk of coalition is the difference between splitting the “African vote” versus consolidating it.

Ethnic voting patterns run deep, as such, anyone who expects mass shifts in voting patterns is firmly set in the realm of delusion. However, an applicable term we used in my days in the AFC is “flaking off”.
Meaning that, each party, given the right platform, has the ability to chip away at another party’s traditional ethnic support base in small flakes in every district.

In our proportional representation system, that can total out to create shifts in seat allocations sufficient to change the configuration of government and the structure of power. As it stands currently, and for the foreseeable future, the PPP/C is in the ascendency and it is the party doing the “flaking off”.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.