YET another high-profile casualty has occurred in the PNC – Mr. Jermaine Figueira has been ousted from his leadership position in Linden. If you count up the huge names that have had serious falling out with Aubrey Norton and no longer hold substantial positions within the PNC’s hierarchy, then the analysis should point to electoral devastation in 2025.

There has never been a moment in the PNC’s history where there has been such hemorrhaging. You look at the PNC today and you know that it is at its weakest moment since its formation in the mid 1950s. With those names gone, with hardly any famous Indian personalities left, how is it possible for such a party to retain its present parliamentary numbers?

Mr. Norton recently said that the PNC can win the 2025 national poll even without the AFC. It was an outrageous statement to make but it is understandable in the context of opposition politics. One must at all times understand that opposition politics is about keeping the faith. You cannot expect opposition politicians to admit that it cannot defeat the incumbent. Any hierarchical member of an opposition that utter such a sentence will be automatically removed.

Opposition politics includes the denial of reality and in this case, Aubrey Norton is defying reality. Mr. Norton is not stupid; he has been around a long time in politics to know that names and faces are fundamental requirements to win an election.

To win votes, political parties must have leaders that have the following qualities – charismatic aura; a powerful oratory reach, a record of an enduring penetration of important sectors in the society, the uncanny ability to win minds whether by demagogic outlay, subliminal manipulation or the natural talent to win hearts and minds.

If you examine the present content of the PNC, those characteristics are lacking.

Frankly, I think Norton given his long experience can hold a crowd but that is it. The PNC is devoid of personnel that meet those requirements listed above. Juxtapose the PPP with the PNC in this context and you have to be a shameless, dishonest analyst to even suggest that the two parties are even.

There are two questions facing the analyst in relation to next year’s election results – how many seats the PNC will lose and how large will be the PPP’s majority. It is too early to give exact numbers but I will say that the PPP will win the election with an increase majority and the PNC will lose seats.

There is a difficult game the PNC elders are playing. They know the PNC is weak and getting weaker. They know Norton has played out all his cards. But they have adopted a strategy of hands off. If they confront Norton to undermine him, it gives Norton the latitude to appeal to his supporters with the fear of the elders that their intervention may be to the benefit of Norton.

The best strategy the PNC elders feel they can pursue is allow for electoral devastation to destroy Norton then they will launch a campaign to remove him. A leader who suffers substantial electoral humiliation is bound to be vulnerable to an orchestrated removal campaign. But this is a serious gamble the elders are taking. This is a risk fraught with danger.

The Alliance For Change and any other party that will be born will not snatch PPP votes. The PPP votes are secured. The AFC and newer parties that emerge are going to get ballots that would have gone to the PNC. Take two simple examples.
One is the announcement by the WPA that David Hinds will be its presidential candidate. The only Guyanese voting for David Hinds are African, anti-government voters who would have gone with the PNC in the first place. The second example lies in the theory of Chronicle columnist, Leonard Craig. He said on the Freddie Kissoon Show and in his Chronicle column that Nigel Hughes’ politics since 2020 has gone in the direction of Afro-centricity. There are no Indians in the current hierarchy of the AFC.

The gamble of the PNC elders that they will remove Norton after he becomes politically untenable after the 2025 elections is an enormous one. Corbin at the height of his vanishing credibility lost six seats to the AFC in 2006. And Norton has lost much more credibility in 2024 than Corbin did in 2005.

The question is if the PNC is seriously routed in the November 2025 election and those seats go to the PPP, the AFC, WPA and other third parties, how can the PNC elders resurrect the PNC when that may not be possible? It is either now or never.

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.