Writer’s note: This is a truncated version of my article in the 7th edition of the book, Oil Dorado, published last week.
THE upcoming 2025 general and regional elections in Guyana is an oxymoronic affair. It will generate enormous interest but in a contradictory way, it will be perhaps the most uninteresting general and regional elections in Guyana’s history.

One has to contrast the upcoming 2025 poll with the 2020 contest. The 2020 battle was a unidimensional affair. The war was fought over oil. Oil was the battle ground and this explains the extreme measures and dangerous pathways the APNU+AFC embraced to retain power.

By 2018, the APNU+AFC regime knew that oil revenues would be coming in and it will increase exponentially every single year way into the 2040s. Whoever controls petro-dollars would be in a position to transform Guyana in phenomenally profound ways.
The APNU+AFC government had sufficient, educated people to know that the core of revolutionary fervour is to empower the classes and strata that are not sharing in the national wealth of society. Revolutionary changes are generated when classes clash over the distribution of scarce resources.

If resources are plentiful, there still might be elitist strata, but the country’s assets will ensure that dispossessed classes are elevated in the economy. This was the core reason for the failure of anti-capitalist revolutions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Europe. Revisionist Marxists argued that Marx did not live long enough to see that capitalism can generate wealth that could mute the revolutionary noises of the proletariat.

Indeed, this is what has happened in the capitalist West, particularly Scandinavia. Capitalism took on a more distributive and humane face, thus blunting revolutionary instincts of the masses. Armed with this theory, the APNU+AFC bosses figured that if they were in control of Guyana, then they could use petro dollars not only to transform the economy, but also politics in general– politics in the sense of winning elections.

The APNU+AFC leadership realised that it will not be easy to vote out a government that has money to spend for developmental and social purposes. So when it realised that it had lost the 2020 battle, it resorted to openly tampering with the results. In the March 2020 elections, the stakes were extremely high – who gets oil money will get votes to win elections.

That is the way APNU+AFC saw it and they were prepared to hold on to power and the endorsers of such a Burnhamite methodology included Walter Rodney’s revolutionary comrades in the Working People’s Alliance, particularly Clive Thomas, Eusi Kwayana, Moses Bhagwan, Nigel Westmaas, David Hinds and Rupert Roopnaraine.

As people who studied class politics, these gentlemen knew that with the flow of oil money, the APNU+AFC would be in a position to change the face of Guyana, a face that never smiled since the early 1950s. Thomas knew that with oil money, there could be enormous dents made into poverty. In an interview with David Hinds, he said he cannot agree with the Moray House Mensheviks (John Mair’s term – see his article in the third edition of this series — Thomas did not mention those words in the interview) who advocate for leaving the oil in the ground.

Thomas’s essential point in rejecting the ideology of the Moray House Mensheviks was that oil money is needed to eradicate poverty. He went on to point to 2028 when enormous oil profits will come Guyana’s way. It is easy then to speculate that Thomas’s thinking permeated the entire corridor of power during the days after Tuesday, March 3 in 2020, when the election results showed a PPP victory.

Oil then was the factor that led to one of the most agonising political disasters in Guyana’s political history – the five months of conspiratorial planning in 2020 to change the legal results of the elections. What has taken place since 2020 is a nightmare for the PNC, WPA and AFC. Who controls the oil purse will be in an advantageous position to use petro-dollars to change the economy of Guyana for a long, long time to come.

The gargantuan difference between the 2020 poll and that of the one coming up next year will be the absence of the zero-sum fight over oil. The government has to face the constant condemnation of the opposition and anti-PPP haters in certain groups such as the Moray House Mensheviks and the anti-Indian ideologues in the Mulatto/Creole Class (MCC).

They will not admit that oil money is being used to make Guyana a better place to live in. In 2025, President Ali’s style of governance will be a decisive factor. Ali appears to be a different leader that Guyana has never seen before, even though Forbes Burnham and Dr Cheddi Jagan received phenomenal embrace at different periods in contemporary Guyana. How oil money has been spending and the way Dr Ali delivers will bring about an Ali victory in 2025.

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.