THIS relatively unknown country, comparatively speaking, with just about 800,000 persons, produced and keep producing some strange political traits that, if Guyana were a globally known middle-power, the universities around the world would have turned out books after books about political developments in this country.
Two political curiosities occurred last year that are yet to generate sociological analyses from Guyanese academics in and out of the country. The first one is the unbelievable refusal of a political leader to resign from his party after his party was almost wiped out in a general election. Not one person from that party’s hierarchy or from within the leadership and its coalition partners in APNU asked that disgraced leader to step down.
Executives left; some remained and criticised the arrogance and autocratic behaviour of their leader, but last year not one of them told the leader that such a disaster normally and morally results in the leader leaving. What happened in the PNC last year is unheard of in any country in the world. It simply does not happen in the real world.
The word “disaster” is a mild term when one puts under the microscope what happened to the PNC in the 2025 national election. It was reduced from 31 seats to 12. It lost all the regional government it controlled before 2025. It was displaced by a party birthed just three months before the poll, and the Statements of Poll showed that the party that displaced the PNC received its votes predominantly from parts of Guyana that traditionally voted for the PNC. And it lost the Opposition Leader position in Parliament, which never happened before since the PNC’s birth in 1957.
It would have taken weeks, not months, for the leader to bow to internal pressure from his senior executives and leave. That did not happen last year. The disgraced leader went on to speak about his future endeavours as head of the party, and the party’s hierarchy remained silent. This incredible political debauchery is what the PNC’s hierarchy was happy to live with last year.
My contestation is that would not have happened in any political party in the 20th century or anywhere else in the world right now. Let’s go to Barbados to see what happened and if we see what happened there, if it made Guyana a political aberration last year in the entire world.
In 2018, the opposition, Barbados Labour Party won all the parliamentary seats. The incumbent, Freundel Stuart, of the Democratic Labour Party (DLM) resigned and was replaced by Verla De Peiza. In the 2022 election there was a unique repetition of the 2018 results; the DLM< did not get even one seat. De Peiza resigned as DLP’s leader to be replaced by Dr. Ronnie Yearwood. In a dispute within the DLP, its leader, Dr. Yearwood was expelled.
One can go on to cite literally dozens of examples around the world where the electoral devastation under the party leader caused his removal. What took place in Guyana last year has no parallel in any other country. Norton would not have survived in any other country.
The second incredible occurrence last year in this country took place within the PNC itself. Just a brief note before we proceed. The PNC has been one of the two historic, political leviathans in the history of Guyana, the other being the PPP. It held power from 1964 to 1992 and again from 2015 to 2020. The President of Guyana in those years (2015-2020), President Granger told a gathering of PNC die-hards in the diaspora that he was a member of the PNC for over 50 years.
Still alive in Guyana is one of the men that built the PNC after it was born in 1957. He is Hamilton Green. From 1957 to 1992, Mr. Green was the third and, at times, the second most powerful man in the PNC. What Aubrey Norton did to the PNC from 2022 to September 2025, has not met with any response from the PNC stalwarts who have served the PNC from 1957 to 2025.
Mr. Granger, Mr. Green, the rest of the former PNC ministers in the ANPU+AFC government of 2015-2020 uttered not a word about the dying PNC and the direct role Norton played in bringing the PNC to its deathbed last year. For the record, there was one exception, former Finance Minister Winston Jordan.
Like in the previous occurrence where electoral disaster visited the PNC, the second factor listed here made Guyana different from the rest of the world. Imagine a leader caused the exodus of the brains in the party and led it to electoral decimation, and the elders said not one word. Guyana was a global embarrassment last year.
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.