I HAVE written dozens of articles showing where the PNC was heading for disaster. Then just nearing the elections, Aubrey Norton called me on the phone to say my predictions about him were wrong and those things I am predicting before the election, he will prove me wrong.

I met Gary Best, the former head of the army and current PNC big wig in the Massy Supermarket. I told him that Mohamed will dent the PNC. He did not agree.
It is not Norton alone that portrays in graphic ways how flawed is the human being, but also people like Best, Dexter Todd, Ronald Daniels, Roysdale Forde too, who are all lawyers. Terrence Campbell is a perfect example of the innate flaws of homo sapiens.

Campbell says he has been a successful businessman for 40 years, but he is ignorant about politics and his ignorance showed up more colourfully when he spent months being close to Nigel Hughes, and they both knew how electorally untenable Norton was and tried to persuade him to accept a consensus candidate other than Norton. Yet, Campbell went into the arms of a disastrous leader. It just shows humans are a highly defective species.

Two years ago the writing was on the wall for Norton. Never before has the Caribbean seen a party leader for whom nothing was going right. Norton was carrying the PNC to the abyss, and the lawyers, doctors, intellectuals, professionals, political stalwarts, business folk who had some kind of entrenchment inside the PNC, were too psychologically deficient to stop Norton.
The years went by and Norton became more untenable and a gargantuan electoral liability to the PNC, but vision was lacking inside the PNC, something the founder of the PNC, Forbes Burnham, had an excess of.

No one in the PNC had the vision and courage to stop Norton. Then came the AFC that told the PNC leadership that their guy cannot win the election, and the possibility does exist to win, but Norton is not electable, so have a new presidential candidate.

PNC leaders with no memory, psyche, soul and also commonsense rejected the AFC’s overtures. They backed their leader to beat Irfaan Ali. The world now sees that Norton not only failed to beat Ali, but also endangered the very life of his historic party that before September 1 was accepted by every Guyanese in and out of the land as a natural part of the social landscape of Guyana.
The insanity of a section of the 2025 election results will be hard to be surpassed by any other election maybe anywhere else in the world. One uses the word “insane” because the PNC was not devastated by a humoungous intervention by the PPP, its traditional rival, but by an East Indian Muslim man who is super-rich and entered politics from June and took 16 seats from the PNC in three months.

I am looking at the 2025 statistics in depth as I write. In places of the African world in Guyana, where African Guyanese voted solidly the past 60 years for the PNC, Azruddin Mohamed displaced the PNC by getting either more votes than the PNC, or votes that no one else got except the PNC the past 60 years.
Let’s display the horrendous defeat of the PNC by WIN in just one region, that is Region Four, where no one had ousted the PNC since elections in British Guiana started. The PPP got 80,920 in Region Four in 2020.

It increased that by just over 6,600 in 2025. No one stole votes from the PPP in Region Four in 2025. The PNC got 116,000 in Region Four in 2020. It got 47,000 in 2025; WIN got 41,600 in 2025 in Region Four. This analyst is contending that those were PNC votes that Mohamed got.

Let us examine in further detail the historic defeat of the PNC by this newcomer named Azruddin Mohamed, who should not have got 1,000 votes in Region One, yet has beat the PNC. In 2020 the PNC got 4,000 votes. The PPP got 8,000. In 2025, the PPP held its own, but the PNC got a mere 469 ballots and WIN got 5,700. Those were PNC votes WIN got, not PPP’s.
Perhaps at no time in the history of this country has one person so damaged a large national political party as what Norton did to the PNC in 2025.

The PNC was crucified in the 2025 elections because of Norton’s misery time in the political life of Guyana. Yet no group of PNC legacy-protectors in this historic organisation had the psychological boldness to step in and save the PNC. As for Norton himself, his destructive nature is indicative of the innate fault-lines in humans.

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.