FROM 2022 onwards, there was absolutely nothing going for the total opposition parties and their surrogates. The PNC was losing top leaders, the AFC making impositions on the PNC for a joint slate, and Burke, Benschop and David Hinds had reached the point of diminishing returns.

The infamous triumvirate (Hinds, Burke and Benschop) have shaped their linguistics to appeal to scrapeheads since the August 2020 inauguration so that after a time they offered nothing intellectual to hundreds of thousands of young Guyanese who want to hear analyses and interpretations. Read Burke after this column when he responds. It is a cussing down rather than a critical analysis of the politics of Frederick Kissoon.

So at the beginning of the year, nothing was happening in Guyana to make people feel that Guyana had a plausible opposition to the ruling party. The only thing tried since September 2020 was the instigated violence in Cotton Tree that month that was supposed to have spread to dozens of other African areas but it did not happen. After Cotton Tree there was a poor attempt to rally Guyanese around the Mahdia tragedy.

That did not work because humans would have revolted against the use of the death of 20 young lives by an alleged arsonist to generate agitation against the government. Only two organisations saw an opening to use the Mahdia tragedy for anti-government purposes – the Trade Union Council which called for the dropping of the 20 murder charges against the accused and Red Thread, which showed more sympathy for the accused than the families of the 20 victims.

Then came the month of April. The accidental drowning of a young girl named Adriana Younge brought the combined opposition to life. That tragedy was horrendously twisted by the basic instincts of raw human savagery to create country-wide instability. The opposition now believed that they had a trump card to beat the government with.

It didn’t work for two reasons. First, the dead girl’s dignity was sacrificed on the altar of money and politics. Nationwide sympathy for the Younge family evaporated. The culmination of this evil strategy was violence, looting, and robberies on April 28 that, as expected, took an anti-Indian architecture. This was the second dimension of the Adriana Younge tragedy that disgusted the nation.

By June, the steam had gone out of the Younge bandwagon, especially after the third pathologist supported the integrity of the original autopsy. By the end of June, the combined opposition had to look for another bandwagon to keep their electoral hopes alive. They tried Baby Skello. A silly man that maybe could be deemed a musical scrapehead, he was an indecent fellow to insult the feelings of thousands of Hindu worshippers.

He should not have been denied bail but he was. The opposition got an adrenaline shot. PNC stalwart, Sherwood Lowe, led the charge by accusing the government of subtle interference in that judicial decision. But the Baby Skello thing fizzled out because he got bail and it was not an issue that opposition supporters would have taken to the streets for.

The death of the Baby Skello jumbie meant that the opposition had to go hunting again because elections were drawing close. They found it in Azruddin Mohamed. He became their symbol of anti-government rage because they were crying out that the government was out to get him. Mohamed became the rallying point for them. Then came a moment of madness in Guyanese politics where hilarity met failure.

Once Mohamed announced his presidential run and began recruiting African Guyanese, he was dropped like a hot cake. None of the opposition parties is even mentioning his name. Not one person from any opposition party makes reference to Mohamed.

With a month to go before the election, what is there to galvanise the opposition parties? They have to find something. And unless that something comes up quickly, they are in trouble. At the moment they are grabbing at anything, even though some of the sticks they pick up to hit the government with are made of porridge. For example, Travis Chase fooled them into believing that the Americans are about to sanction some government minister.

They ran with it with the new boy on the block, Terrence Campbell, who deserted his friend, Nigel Hughes, shouting down that the PPP is in big trouble. No sanctions came, so the search for a new jumbie goes on. I would like to end on a satirical note. The opposition will seek a big protest march because an old lady is going to slip on a banana skin outside Bourda Market and hurt herself. The cry will be the government is responsible.
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.