IN a Facebook post last Wednesday, Terrence Campbell noted that there must be a grand coalition of churches, political parties, trade unions and civil society groups to oust the PPP from power. One of the destructive instincts of opposition personalities is the absolute and complete lack of obligation on their part to provide answers to people they want to attract, people they want to listen to them and people they advise to denounce the government.
As I write this piece, perennial critic of the government from Red Thread, Vanda Radzik comes to mind. Ms. Radzik is an advocate against oil production. She was part of a group that that wrote the president demanding that oil production be stopped because of climate destruction (see my column on this for last Wednesday).
When the BBC programme, HardTalk came to Guyana, the host interviewed Ms. Radzik. He asked her if she expects Guyana to forsake the billions of American dollars it earns from the oil industry and leave the oil in the ground. Ms. Radzik told the host that there are two spectrums. One is to leave the oil in the water, the other to get a better contract from EXXON.
Ms. Radzik never transmitted to her interviewer what her position was. And she had a perspective which she conveyed to President Ali. To date Ms. Radzik has never explained why she withheld telling HardTalk what her position was. She does not feel she has an obligation to the people she appeals to.
This is the barefacedness of so many of those whose constituencies they address each day but deliberately choose not to offer explanations to those same constituencies. Terrence Campbell is part of this school. The general election of 2025 was a mere nine months ago. Months before the election, Mr. Campbell was part of an effort to get an APNU+AFC coalition with a consensus candidate from outside the coalition.
Mr. Campbell in fact was a lone actor trying to get the PNC leader, Mr. Norton, to accept a non-PNC candidate for the coalition on behalf of the AFC. He told the media that he promised the AFC to metaphorically break the hand of Aubrey Norton to secure coalition reality.
There was no agreement between APNU and AFC and a number of parties contested the election on their own. There was no opposition unity. Mr. Campbell himself was touted by Nigel Hughes as a consensus candidate. For the first half of 2025, Mr. Campbell was in the camp of the AFC only to become an APNU candidate in July 2025.
So here is Mr. Campbell now offering the wish that there be a grand coalition that must happen if the PPP is to be removed. Nine months have gone by since the general election and in those nine months Mr. Campbell has published a daily Facebook post on which he ruminates on everything under the sun and the moon but never his thoughts on why opposition parties went into the election separately.
He has only once given his take for the collapse of talk between APNU and AFC. He noted that the PNC offered a 65/35 power-sharing formula which the AFC rejected. But why the PNC wanted 65/35? Why was the AFC unhappy with that? He was closely involved in the effort to broker a covenant, so he needs to level with the people of Guyana why he thinks a 65/35 formula was workable or not.
Since he composes a daily Facebook page, why doesn’t he explain to the Guyanese people the reason he chose to be an election candidate for ANPU and not AFC with which he had an episodic working relation for years? It simply boggles the mind that opposition figures could take to Facebook and YouTube and appeal to people to listen to them but never offer explanations to them.
Do they think these people are robots thus they do not deserve answers? Last year, I asked Campbell a question that based on context any political commentator would ask in any country in the world. My curiosity was that now he is the head of the APNU’s parliamentary group would he shake President Ali’s hand. Here is what Campbell did. He took the column in which I asked that question and posted it on his Facebook page. He never answered my question.
But why does Campbell feel that people who like and admire him are not interested in knowing his position on the shake-hand issue? I think almost 99 percent of the people that support Terrence Campbell would like to know how he feels about the shake-hand issue.
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.
