I MONITOR world affairs. It is my job. I have never seen an election battle anywhere except Guyana where the opposition campaign, the anti-incumbent media, and the lunatic fringe on social media have not publicised even an infinitesimal speck of evidence that the incumbent made an anti-woman remark, a homophobic insult, or expressed a racially driven sentiment.
I don’t read the lunatic fringe because each of them repeats the race mantra and it has come to the point where even the insanely hostile press against the government and the obsessive anti-PPP civil society groups do not even bother with the lunatic fringe. If a vehicle of an Indian driver runs a red light and strikes an African person, the (fictional) racial intention of the driver becomes the focus.
But that is all the lunatic fringe does. They have not produced any evidence that can cause Dr. Ali to look electorally vulnerable. Christopher Ram and the Stabroek News held on to an email exchange between the President and Azruddin Mohamed and jumped into the air with it. But in that exchange, there was no damaging output from the President that could have caused credibility damage. There were no words of graphic incrimination by the President in those emails.
Strangely, Mr. Ram has glorified the entry into politics of Azruddin Mohamed, a politician who does not have even in one of his toes the credibility of Mohamed Irfaan Ali. The Stabroek News is more subtle than Ram. It shies away from praise of Mohamed but it gives his rallies more coverage than the PPP’s.
The campaign has ended. Yesterday (Saturday) was the last day to be involved in official campaigning. After months on the road, the ubiquitous proof is that Ali has had phenomenal turnouts. Oceanic attendances do not guarantee massive voting. But in the absence of any scientific poll, you have to use some kind of methodology and the huge campaign rallies of Ali indicate that he is in safe waters.
Mohamed Irfaan Ali deserves a second chance to do what Forbes Burnham, Cheddi Jagan, and Walter Rodney could not have achieved. You have to include Rodney because he was as popular as Jagan and Burnham and he wanted state power. But Rodney was imprisoned by the social stratum that provided his platform—the Mulatto/Creole class (MCC).
There is sufficient evidence that Rodney did not do any serious, sustained grounding in Indian communities because he was limited to the urban proletariat that the MCC provided him with. In relation to Burnham, it became impossible for him to win over Indians for two crucial reasons. He perpetuated violence against Indians to win state power and they were not prepared to forgive him when he got into power. As a spin off from this, Burnham never pursued an Indian project because he felt he would never get Indian support.
Jagan’s Marxist ontology provided him with the best opportunity to secure an African embrace. But the poisonously divisive politics of the post-1960 world in Guyana stood in Jagan’s way. Essentially, Jagan was non-racist. There was a deep Freudian respect for Jagan in the African mind and eventually Jagan would have won over Africans, but Burnham became more divisive and the MCC was not prepared to create space for Jagan because the MCC is culturally very anti-Indian.
So as Burnham became more unpalatable and as Jagan became more acceptable to Africans, the MCC invented the Working People’s Alliance that told the African proletariat and the African middle class that the WPA can topple Burnham so put your faith in the WPA and don’t worry about Jagan. When Jagan got into the presidency, the thin national economy at the time did not allow for Jagan to spread the wealth to benefit African Guyanese communities.
This task has been left to Irfaan Ali. What is taking place in Guyana in 2025 is that what Jagan did not have access to in order to bring about an uprooting of the racial fences, Irfaan Ali has done. In five years’ time, no president of this country has seen the gravitation of African Guyanese to a non-African president. Irfaan Ali has already taken up vast space in the intellectual and philosophical polemics on race relations in Guyana.
A sociological phenomenon is taking place in Guyana, with the epicenter being the nature of Ali’s ontology. He is creating a comforting, multi-racial Guyana that has defied this country for so long. I believe Ali has made the creation of a stable multi-racial society perhaps his main dream (though it may be diplomatically wise for him to elaborate) and in his second term he will make his dream a reality. Ali should be given a second term because Guyana’s future hangs on that second chance.