IN my column of Monday, October 13, 2025, titled “Walton-Desir and Norton on a self-destructive path,” I opined that one of the factors that could have been responsible for the low turnout was the invincibility theory about the PPP that the PNC unwittingly promulgated and that their supporters accepted.
When PNC voters soaked in the five-year-old (2020-2025) contestation by their party, the AFC, the WPA, and organizations like ACDA that the PPP perpetuated fraud in 2020 to secure power, this deterred opposition supporters from voting in 2025 because in their psychology, if the PPP could have so dominated the election process on voting day in 2020 and it was in the opposition, then the result is a foregone conclusion in 2025 because the PPP is in power and their party, the PNC, told them that the PPP is invincible.
I believe that invincibility factor was one of the reasons PNC supporters did not vote. I will now look at some other variables that determined the 2025 election results. One is the attitude of the PNC and AFC to power. There were substantial numbers that wanted nothing to do with the PNC and AFC because they believed if they won in 2025, there would be no further free and fair elections, and Guyana would have one-party rule forever, as they experienced under Forbes Burnham.
WIN was preferred to the PNC and AFC because people feared once in power the PNC would rule forever.
I think no analyst could secure the respect from people for his/her scholarship if they fail to give importance to the factor of how people felt about the 2020 election disaster and how that determined their voting attitude in 2025.
Secondly, I believe the electorate completely shut out the AFC because of what their leader, Nigel Hughes had become.
If Clive Thomas, Rupert Roopnaraine, Eusi Kwayana, and Moses Bhagwan, through an ignominious and egregious act of self-destruction over the 2020 election horror show, destroyed their hard-earned legacy, so did Nigel Hughes.
He was not involved in the AFC’s caricatured stay in power from 2015 to 2020. He was not physically involved in the attempts to rig the 2020 election.
With that type of plausible record, he should have maintained that image but chose to destroy it through two nasty acts and one type of action by his wife, Cathy when she was a Cabinet Minister.
One is his intervention in contorting the 2018 no-confidence vote through the mathematical acrobatics of 34 is a majority of 65 and not 33. Because of the introduction of that absurdity and the life it took on, Nigel damaged his image beyond repair.
The second repugnant lapse was his refusal to denounce the 2020 rigging. People expected better of him because he played no part in it, so why not denounce it.
One of the ironies in the failed negotiations between Norton and Nigel is that Nigel was convinced that Norton was unelectable but Nigel himself was unelectable and the 2025 election results proved that both were not embraced by the electorate.
It was more embarrassing for Nigel because he didn’t come near to a number that could have given the top-up votes that Amanza Walton-Desir got.
A third factor in the electorate’s rejection of Nigel and the AFC was because of the highly publicised controversy between Cathy Hughes, when she was a minister and long-serving executive of the AFC, Trevor Williams, who, at the time was the project manager for the D’Urban Park project.
Ms. Hughes refused, according to Mr. Williams, to give him the cell number of Ms. Volda Lawrence with the words of Ms. Hughes being, “I cannot give out the cell number of a minister.”
What shocked people and after I wrote about it, I got dozens of responses, was people felt that if she could treat an important AFC bigwig like that, then imagine what she will do to the ordinary folks.
The feeling out there when that revelation was made was that the AFC is a Mulatto/Creole elitist outfit that treated Williams like that because of class and colour
The commonsensical thing for Hughes to have done was to immediately offer an apology to Williams and admit it was a lapse that she regretted.
That could have gone billions of miles to repair the damage. But the damage was irreparable because this columnist knows that inside the PNC leadership, the snobbery of Williams was seen as a class thing. It drove deeper into the collective psyche of the PNC that an alliance with the AFC maybe was not such a good thing after all.
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.