THIS week’s meeting between Vice-president Dr Bharrat Jagdeo and a diverse group of Guyanese with roots in the political opposition is the latest, and perhaps clearest, evidence of a continued shift underway across Guyana: citizens who once stood in opposition ranks are choosing, in growing numbers, to stand with the People’s Progressive Party/Civic and the development agenda it has built.
This is no isolated defection. It follows a now-familiar pattern of former opposition parliamentarians, councillors and community organisers stepping away from the politics of obstruction and towards the politics of participation.
The journey of former opposition parliamentarian, Deonarine Ramsaroop, who led the group to meet with Jagdeo, captures the shift in miniature. A man who once held senior office in the AFC and later crossed to APNU has, within the space of a year, arrived at the same conclusion so many others are reaching: that Guyana’s transformation is real, and that sitting on the sidelines of it serves no one, least of all the communities these leaders were elected to represent.
What is most striking about Wednesday’s engagement is its breadth. This was not a handful of disgruntled figures from one party. Sitting alongside Ramsaroop and Ravoldo Birbal were a sitting APNU councillor, former PNC members, former AFC members, and community figures with no single partisan pedigree.
When defectors from rival opposition camps arrive at the same table, drawn by the same government, it stops looking like political poaching and starts looking like consensus.
People are not being pulled from one column to another; they are converging on the same conclusion from different starting points.
That conclusion is not hard to understand. Guyana’s economy is expanding at a pace few nations have ever matched, and the PPP/C has directed that growth into the things people actually feel in their daily lives: new housing schemes, upgraded health facilities, expanded education access, and infrastructure reaching communities that waited generations for it.
Political loyalty built on grievance eventually runs up against a government that simply delivers.
Ramsaroop and those who joined him are not abandoning principle; they are recognising results.
Just as important is what this says about the PPP/C’s own approach. A governing party secure in its support does not need to widen its base. That the government continues to actively engage citizens from every political background, rather than writing them off as permanent opponents, reflects a confidence rooted in performance rather than partisanship.
It is governance measured not by who voted for you, but by who ultimately wants to build the country alongside you.
Guyana is entering a period of consequence, and the choice facing every citizen is not really about old party labels. It is about whether to participate in the nation’s development or to watch it from the outside.
Ramsaroop, Birbal, and the group that met the Vice-President this week made their choice. If the pattern of the last year is any indication, they will not be the last.
