TWO APNU parliamentarians, Terrence Campbell from the PNC and David Hinds from the WPA have called for social mobilisation to put pressure on the PPP to be democratic. When one thinks about who these two men are, you are inclined to dismiss their advocacy as comical.
But a serious intellectual assessment is useful because such an analysis has pedagogical properties that lead to the education of a nation. So, let’s pause the type of personalities that have issued the call and look at exactly what the call is about.
To generate social mobilisation to exert pressure on the government involves many essential factors of which one stands out and that is leadership. Throughout history, mass agitation only becomes successful when it has organisational direction. Dialectically, an uprising can take place without any concentrated presence of leadership.
But the spontaneous outbreak can only endure if it has leadership to guide it and to give it stimulus. This is where the concept of the role of the individual in history comes in. The Russian genius, Lenin, covered this ground extensively in his writings. A spontaneous confrontation between workers and state never endures without the guiding hand of a group of leaders or an individual whose charisma, credibility and rhetoric are penetrating.
In Guyana, where is that leadership? In Guyana, what is visible to any citizen is opposition leadership that has no credibility, appeal, and political finesse. Let’s start with Hinds. If there is any leader who went on to the battlefield and when he looked over his shoulders, his soldiers were gone, it is David Hinds.
Henry Jeffrey has taken up the advocacy of Campbell and Hinds. After endorsing the position of Campbell and Hinds, Henry noted that the two large parties control over 80 per cent of the voting population. Jeffrey, Campbell, and Hinds argue that with such ethnic division, the PPP discriminates against the other half of the population.
Here is where Campbell, Jeffrey and Hinds must never be allowed to go unanswered. Let us examine how 80 per cent of the population voted in the general election last year. The combined votes of the PPP and WIN in 2025 were 351, 564 out of a total number of 438, 467 ballots. This means that the PPP with an Indian presidential candidate and WIN with an Indian presidential leader pulled in 80 per cent of the votes. The party that has been generally associated with African Guyanese, the PNC, secured 78, 000 votes for a point of 18 per cent.
The voting structure of the 2025 elections has never been discussed by Hinds, Campbell, and Jeffrey since September 2025. All three men have daily Facebook posts but there is never any discussion of the elections results. They cannot discuss the results because it wipes away their argument of ethnically deterministic voting.
How is this point tied up with the leadership question that has been raised at the beginning of this article? The 2025 elections results prove that people like Hinds and others have been rejected by the Guyanese population. Who then is going to lead the social mobilisation that the three men want? Let’s return to Hinds’ soldiers deserting him.
From September 2020 when the PPP won the elections, there has been a daily outpouring of race sermons by Hinds. He became a candidate in the 2025 elections. And his party secured 18 per cent of the votes with the GECOM data base revealing that WIN, headed by a Muslim Indian man, gained the votes from areas that traditionally voted for the PNC before there was ANPU, and since APNU came on the scene.
Can it be argued that Hinds then was rejected by the very people he has been appealing to since 2020? That is my contention so he will not be accepted in any spontaneous outbreak.
That brings us to Terrence Campbell. Just weeks before the 2025 polls, Campbell went on to the APNU slate. But his presence did not stem from the exodus of voters from both the PNC and APNU. So, it begs the question as to whether he has leadership qualities. If the answer is yes, then, how do you explain his failure to prevent the crossing over of more than 100, 000 traditional PNC votes to WIN?
Each time Jeffrey and Hinds open their mouth or put pen to paper it is about race. Here are the words of Jeffrey: “What Guyana has are large scale ethnic expressions of dissatisfaction that have now been largely suppressed by the PPP.”
This bell has been rung out. This song has been sung out. This drum has lost its beat. There is a new Guyana that has left that bell, song, and drum behind.
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.
