ONE of the enduring curiosities humans have about politicians is their experience. Most humans feel comfortable if they know their new country’s president or prime minister has experience in politics, whether at the local or central level. In the US, the criterion people are happy with is military service.

Americans like their Congress representatives, Senators, and Cabinet Secretaries to have had long service in the military. Americans feel that if you have military experience, then you can better serve the country. A candidate with no experience is at a disadvantage when competing with someone who served in previous governments and is familiar with the contours of governance.

I will return to devote entire columns to Azruddin Mohamed, but for now I will just note that he has introduced a weird concept never before seen in the CARICOM region — a playboy who never worked a day in his life, suddenly found out that being a playboy and spending his father’s money like crazy could make people vote for him. More on this later, but let’s look at Terrence Campbell and the comicality of politics.

I have been around a long time and I never heard about a man named Terrence Campbell knocking around politics or taking an interest in politics. Suddenly, this billionaire has been catapulted into the political limelight by the PNC and AFC and those two parties took Campbell seriously.
So, after discovering Campbell, the PNC and AFC allowed him the time of six months to bring the PNC and AFC into a coalition. Campbell himself publicly said he spent six months with that endeavour. The Campbell factor as a go-between with the PNC and the AFC is unheard of in Guyanese politics.

How can you take a complete political novice and put him to be a serious negotiator with the PNC and AFC, when he belongs to none of them and has never served even for one week in the office of any political party in Guyana or had even a tiny relation with one of the governments the past 40 years. Aubrey Norton actually sat down for six months and listened to Campbell?

And what was Campbell telling Norton, one of Guyana’s most senior politicians and the most experienced name in the PNC at the moment? When Norton sat across the table and listened to Campbell, what was going through the mind of Norton? Here was a man telling Norton about the permutations of coalition- building and he has never experienced a moment of political negotiations.

The fact that the PNC, not so much the AFC, tolerated that masquerade has proved the gradual withering away of the PNC under Norton. From day one, Norton should have made the same rejection with Campbell as he did with the AFC’s Alstrom Stewart. Norton had said publicly that he was not negotiating with Stewart.
So why did Norton spend six months around the table with Campbell? Because Campbell was a money man. The PNC would not have ostracised Campbell because of who he was – a wealthy businessman. This is where the AFC played its card badly. Given the genetic class instincts of the AFC, it could not psychologically bring itself to ask a trade unionist, a journalist or a university lecturer to represent it in the dialogue with the PNC. The logical choice was a Mulatto/Creole personality.

Here is where the Deputy Vice-Chancellor comes in. She put out a Facebook post a few weeks ago in which she questioned if the Mulatto/Creole factor was not at work in the way Norton is seen by the AFC; more on that later. So was the failure of the dialogue after six months because of the presence of Campbell who lacked experience and finesse and appeared to the PNC negotiators as a political wannabee.

The reason why the dialogue disintegrated hardly had anything to do with the AFC’s chief negotiator. That is for another column, but Campbell’s lack of negotiation skills did not help to improve the intellectual atmosphere in the room. For the AFC, Campbell’s elevation is yet another reason why people dismiss the AFC as a quintessential elitist organisation that the electorate should not give a hundred votes to.

How does the AFC explain its atrocity of putting a newcomer to politics as the point man in the confabulation with the PNC? Why did the AFC come up with the name Terrence Campbell when he was nowhere around the AFC since it was born in 2005? The answer is simple. The same Nigel Hughes was in the room in May 2015 when he and other AFC leaders telephoned someone very closely related to Campbell and offered him the Ministry of the Environment. It did not matter if Campbell lacked political experience. He had class and colour.

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.