THERE is a pattern to how US-indicted Azruddin Mohamed, Guyana’s leader of the opposition, does politics, and this week it played out with almost comic precision.
The same day prosecutors told a Georgetown court that Mohamed’s presence near President Irfaan Ali’s private residence could point to offences as grave as treason or an assassination plot, Team Mohamed’s Facebook page, which is half a million followers strong, disappeared.
His lawyer stopped short of blaming the police, who happened to be holding the phone that ran it. Convenient timing, whoever is responsible.
That is the Mohamed method. When the substance turns hostile, change the subject to the spectacle.
A DJI drone and four phones turned up in his vehicle near Leonora; he was arrested, released on self-bail, then arrested again hours later, this time for livestreaming himself narrating the scene of the first arrest to his followers.
He denies owning the drone. He denies wrongdoing. He live-streams anyway. That is not a man avoiding suspicion, it is a man performing for an audience, because the audience is the point.
The same instinct runs through his defence against extradition. Since committal proceedings opened in January, the money-laundering and wire-fraud case he and his father face in the United States has advanced in fits and starts, not because the evidence is thin, but because Mohamed’s lawyers keep finding new reasons to stop the clock: medical reports, a constitutional challenge to the Fugitive Offenders Act, and appeals all the way to the Caribbean Court of Justice, the region’s highest bench, which has so far thrown out his bids for a stay twice since July alone.
Each rejection is followed, almost reflexively, by another request to pause. On Thursday it was a “crisis of clarity” over a Court of Appeal order; Chief Magistrate Judy Latchman wasn’t buying it, and neither should anyone else. This is not a legal strategy. It is stalling, dressed up as one.
What should worry Guyanese voters is the trajectory, not just the pattern. Each court loss narrows Mohamed’s room to manoeuvre, and each narrowing produces a louder, stranger distraction; a drone controversy here, a deleted Facebook page there. Desperation is rarely subtle, and it is getting less subtle by the week.
Mohamed, however, continues to deny the fraud charges and denies owning the drone. But a defence built on delay, and a following built on spectacle, are not the same things as a case built on innocence. The magical hat is running empty, but we await the next surprise that comes out.
