IF you listen to any PNC parliamentarian in any interview, they never offer an analysis as to why Azruddin Mohamed’s WIN party dethroned the PNC. The interviewers obviously favour the PNC, treat their PNC guests with kid gloves and in turn the PNC guests rush toward those types of interviewers because they know they will not have to face questions that the Guyanese people want to hear from them.

I listened to an interview with Dr. Terrence Blackman putting questions to Terrence Campbell. I would suggest Blackman stick to teaching and leave journalism alone. His line of questioning reveals his lack of journalistic skills. He avoided the questions that had to be asked.

Campbell said that the PPP government is crushing thousands of Guyanese, and he sees it every day. Here was a chance for Blackman to ask a commonsensical question. I will come to that below. The crushing theory was not discovered a few days ago by Campbell when Blackman interviewed him.

Campbell’s party, the APNU and Campbell himself have spoken on that theme long before the September 2025 elections. Here is where Blackman’s commonsensical approach to interviewing should have come in. If the PPP government since the Ali presidency came into being in August 2020, has been pulverising thousands of Guyanese, why that sermon did not galvanise PNC districts all over Guyana to vote for Campbell and the APNU?

The reality is a cruel one. From 31 seats in parliament with the AFC, the PNC plus APNU dropped to 12.  A party named WIN received 16 seats and when the analyst researches the statements of poll (SOPs), he/she finds that WIN’s seats came from predominantly PNC strongholds. I have looked at those SOPs, three times since they became available on the GECFOM website. In fact, WIN’s concentration in Amerindian villages did not result in substantial cross-over votes. The racial cross-voting came from traditional PNC districts all over Guyana.

The WIN’s victory over APNU can only mean one thing, and one thing only – voters rejected the PNC. You can’t have an interview with a politician who three months after a national election is saying that thousands of Guyanese are being downsized by the economy and see no obligation to explain why voters rejected the party that cried out years before the election date that the PPP government was crushing thousands of Guyanese.

Campbell went on to speak of the existence of widespread corruption in the PPP government but corruption was one of the sermons that APNU preached long before the September 2025 election but look how people voted. Interestingly, corruption was not an issue or a preoccupation with traditional PNC supporters in 2025.

The irony about APNU’s corruption cry is that traditional PNC voters gave their ballots to a man who at the time of the September 2025 poll was (and still is) embroiled in alleged financial wrong-doing. At the time of the election campaign, Mr. Azruddin Mohamed was facing prosecution from the Guyana Revenue Authority over alleged tax-evasion. And on another level, Mohamed was sanctioned (and still is) by the American government for alleged financial crimes committed against American customs laws.

These are the issues Dr. Blackman did not put to Campbell. Guyanese people are owed explanations by people like Campbell. Why did so many PNC supporters ditch the PNC thus ignoring the ocean of accusations by APNU and Campbell himself? The statistics are staggering. In 2020, the APNU/AFC acquired 217, 000 ballots. In 2025, PNC got 78, 000.

To date, only one PNC leader has publicly given an explanation for the 2025 electoral devastation of the PNC or APNU, and that is Aubrey Norton, the current leader of the PNC. Norton told the media that in voting for WIN, PNC supporters thought they were helping their own party.

Words like “esoteric” or “strange” or “unfathomable” or “mysterious” are irrelevant in understanding what Norton meant. Maybe the dictionary does not have an appropriate adjective. How can PNC voters give their votes to another party and in doing so they think they were helping their own party?

At a commonsensical level, a citizen has to know that when they vote for party AA, and not party BB, then party BB will get less votes to get into parliament. At a commonsensical level, they must know that it is votes that cause political parties to win elections. So how could they think that by giving their votes to WIN and not the PNC, the PNC will win the government?  The people who will interview Campbell and Norton must ask them to explain this puzzle.

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.