IT was in the midst of the rodeo season that the AFC announced it will be contesting the imminent general election as AFC and not APNU+AFC. Although the AFC stood tall in making the declaration, a majority of Guyanese know it is the AFC’s last rodeo.
The year 2025 will see the final fling at politics for the AFC. The party will do badly in the elections, maybe failing to get even one seat. To explain why this will be the fate of the AFC is to understand something in politics called the Obama moment. Barack Obama came to the US presidency at a special moment and that special moment wanted to have a special person.

He was given the opportunity to be that special person, and he couldn’t be it. If Obama should run again if the US constitution is changed, he would lose outright the primary and wouldn’t go further. It was the same for the AFC from 2005 onwards. Guyana wanted a sandwich between the two Leviathans and that yearning produced the AFC. The sandwich became dead meat. That moment is gone, and it took the AFC with it.
Why we have the AFC making the news today is because Nigel Hughes is having a Tennessee Williams moment. Nigel still believes that the period that produced the charismatic, multi-racial dynamic Nigel Hughes is still there. So, like a Tennessee Williams character, he reaches out to yesteryear, hoping to bring it back.

The person who understands that the Nigel Hughes of 2010 is gone forever is Aubrey Norton. In understanding the intractable difficulties between the AFC and PNC, one must not shut out the capacity of Aubrey Norton to analyse politics in Guyana. You are right to assert that Norton will lose seats in the forthcoming elections, but that doesn’t mean Norton is incapable of making sense out of the new trends sweeping Guyanese politics. He can and he has placed Hughes within a perspective that is workable.
Norton knows that the imploration by the AFC for an APNU+AFC union is the story of Nigel Hughes survival. Norton knows that Hughes is trying to use the PNC so Nigel Hughes can be reborn.  It is this factor that will prevent any coalition between the two entities. Norton feels that Hughes is barefaced and insulting in what he wants from a unity bandwagon.

Nigel is an innovative thinker when it comes to mathematics, as we saw with the no-confidence vote in 2018, but Norton is realistic with his mathematics. He knows that if the coalition wins a 34-seat victory, the AFC gets 14 seats in the 60/40 formula. Norton knows now and into the next 50 years AFC cannot get 70,000 votes to give it 14 seats.

Norton knows that if the team ends up with a defeat and is reduced to 25 seats (which is what is likely to happen) that will give the AFC 10 seats. Even at the height of its fame, the AFC couldn’t get 50,000 votes, where then in 2025, will it get 50,000 votes to collect 10 seats? This is at the core of the dispute, and it is in this area that Norton will not relent.

Here is what I have been reliably informed about and the PNC has not said it openly and will not say it openly but it is the position of the PNC that it will obdurately stick to. The PNC will go into a coalition with the AFC tomorrow and will offer the AFC the prime ministerial candidate. The PNC will concede another consensus candidate but from the PNC. But will the PNC not sign off to a legal paper with the AFC with the guarantee of the number of ministers if the coalition wins and the number of seats if the team loses?
This is the immovable position of the PNC. The story of the 70/30 formula is a smokescreen. The PNC will insist on a PNC consensus candidate knowing the AFC will reject it and that is what the PNC wants. The PNC does not want a coalition with the AFC. The PNC will offer magnanimous concessions to the AFC, but it knows the talks will fade because the AFC’s inflexible position is that the consensus candidate must not be from the PNC.

So in the end the PNC has won. It knows that AFC wants the PNC to raise it from the dead and the PNC will never do that no matter who insists that PNC gives way to the consensus candidate. The PNC knows that the AFC will be devastated in the election and it is quite happy with that.
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.