MONDAY’S meeting between Aubrey Norton and Azruddin Mohamed was never going to solve much, and Guyanese who’ve watched this opposition limp along all year were right not to expect it.
Harder to shrug off is the promised joint statement that never arrived, and a deadline that passed in total silence.
No postponement. No acknowledgment that talks had stalled. Nothing. When two political leaders can’t manage a joint sentence explaining why they couldn’t manage a joint statement, that is the message.
It’s worth remembering how we got here. It was Mohamed, not Norton, who took the GECOM impasse over the opposition’s own commissioners and scrutineers outside the country altogether, briefing diplomats and international observers with real urgency about a crisis he insisted threatened Guyana’s democratic calendar.
That was a strange way to treat a dispute whose only possible resolution sits inside the opposition itself, as no foreign mission can decide who represents WIN, APNU or the Forward Guyana Movement at GECOM; only the men who met on Monday can.
Now that they have actually sat in a room together, that urgency has gone quiet, along with any interest in telling the public what, if anything, was resolved.
Somebody is being unreasonable. Either Norton is refusing to budge on GECOM representation and scrutineers for no good reason, or Mohamed is manufacturing a crisis he has no intention of ever letting anyone settle.
Guyanese have enough evidence to make an educated guess which. This is, after all, a WIN leadership that spent the weeks after its own election loss insisting, without a shred of evidence beyond a GECOM website hiccup, that it had actually won outright and had been cheated out of the presidency.
This is a party with a demonstrated appetite for loud, evidence-free grievance the moment GECOM is involved. If Norton and APNU were genuinely the obstacle here, does anyone believe we would not already have heard about it, repeatedly, and at volume?
Norton, notably, has nothing to gain from a stalemate and no natural home for blame to land on him. He lost the title of Leader of the Opposition when WIN overtook APNU last year, and with it, most of the incentive to be seen sabotaging talks he no longer leads.
His position on the commissioners — that no vacancies exist, and that security of tenure exists precisely to keep GECOM out of the reach of shifting parliamentary alliances — is a constitutional argument, not a tantrum.
He says he engaged in good faith on appointments and was rebuffed, and points out, accurately, that his own party was left off the new Local Government Commission while Mohamed found room for a smaller ally. Those aren’t the complaints of a man manufacturing conflict. They are the complaints of a man documenting one.
Don not wait for a joint statement. A joint statement requires two sides who trust each other enough to agree on a shared account of reality, and trust is precisely what WIN has spent the past year burning through, bypassing Norton to petition the President directly, freezing APNU out of local government appointments, and treating its coalition partner with a disdain it has, more than once, been accused of misrepresenting on the official record.
An opposition that cannot honestly describe its own breakdown to the people who elected it has no business asking those people to believe it could ever govern them.