I KNOW Mr Mohamed’s father (“Shell”) very well. In all the decades that I have known “Shell,” I never talked to the son when he was a little boy because even though I knew “Shell” well, I hardly met him and never socialised with him. This meant I never had a word with Mohamed jnr for all the decades I knew his father.

I saw Mohamed jnr one evening about 10 years ago. He was a grown man now and he was speaking to Glenn Lall. I didn’t know that was “Shell’s” son because I do not think I ever saw him before. Someone told me he was “Shell’s” son. And while talking about him, I was told he owns 10 cars.

Over the past five years, all that I knew about Mohamed was what I saw in videos and what people would tell me about him. And from what I saw, this man was a typical playboy with nothing else to do but show-off with his father’s billions, which he used with unrestrained abandon.

When people show me the things Mohamed did in Guyana, on each occasion, I would say to myself: “How can “Shell” allow his son to behave like that? This is not the Shell I know.” Mohamed was a typical playbook that is portrayed in the movies.

I grew up seeing a lot of playboys, but they were all Portuguese because in those days, the Portuguese mercantile class was coterminous with Guyana, and the playboy crowd came from that class and that ethnicity.

Azruddin Mohamed was unlike any Portuguese playboy from the 1960s. He was far wealthier and the luxury he surrounded himself with, the Portuguese adventurers in the 1960s in Guyana, didn’t have. Mohamed lived a lifestyle that made you wonder if there was anyone like him in the rest of the Caribbean.

This was a man who owned a fleet of vehicles with a market value that touched far more than a billion dollars. What I saw of Mohamed disgusted me, but I didn’t think it was my business to tell his father about the ostentatious lifestyle of his son, which didn’t say much of what “Shell” was encouraging.

I saw videos of him with a detail of bodyguards who would open the vehicle door for him, follow him wherever he goes like puppies and they carry his jacket for him. This was a sight to behold.

Mohamed was out of a Hollywood movie. Then the infamy grew – a triangular love affair that created pyrotechnics, and a Main Street incident that created curiosity all over Guyana.

From what Georgetowners knew of him, this was a man with hardly anything to do except spend his father’s money and show off his expensive luxury vehicles. No one who saw the luxurious lifestyle of Mohamed would ever think he would be serious about anything except la dolce vita, and indeed he had the time and money to waste his life in la dolce vita.

Something weird happened to Mohamed a year ago. Maybe someone whispered in his ear that when you are so rich you can make it to the top in politics and become prime minister or president. And he took what was whispered in his ear very seriously.

There is absolutely nothing unusual, eerie or bizarre about rich people entering politics. Rich folks in the US love to dabble in politics. But those rich folks are people with a huge amount of experience in business and are university-educated people. Azruddin Mohamed has no experience in anything — including politics — except being a playboy.

So, Guyana has reached the stage where a person like Mohamed wants to be the president. I have to say that I deeply regret the mistake of ruling politicians who called his name so often that they made him popular.

The most basic path to follow was to ignore Mohamed. Had the PPP leaders done that, I think Guyanese would have still struggled to remember who he was.

But we have to live with the reality that Mohamed thinks he can become the president. It is literally a fantasy. How can Guyanese look at what Mohamed represents and take him seriously?

Are Guyanese telling people that they will vote for Azruddin? What can Azruddin bring to politics? He knows nothing about politics. Is this the man people are going to give the votes to? I sincerely hope not.

I do believe as the campaign gets going, Azruddin is going to lose steam. As he loses steam, energy and followers, my advice to the PPP is not to keep his name floating in the air.

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.