The day before he was sworn in for his second term as President of Guyana, Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali was doing throwdowns in the Providence Stadium outfield to Guyana Amazon Warriors batter Shimron Hetmyer, ahead of the Warriors’ CPL T20 match against Trinbago Knight Riders. The next night, Ali would do a brief stint in the TV commentary box for the Warriors’ match against the St Kitts and Nevis Patriots.
This is his political gift … his everyman appeal, his ease of letting his hair down. That bore fruit in the general and regional elections six days earlier, in which his People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) had eaten into the mainly Afro-Guyanese base of APNU (A Partnership for National Unity and traditionally one of Guyana’s two main parties). That progress was punctuated by high-level defections.
As with the UNC’s campaign this year, the PPP/C managed at many of their rallies to look representative of the country they were campaigning to lead. That is a branch that the re-elected President grasped in his inauguration speech on September 7.
“I am the President of Guyana,” he said. “My mission is … to serve every citizen of this land, ensuring that every Guyanese has a place in our national family and a stake in our shared future.”
After a short-lived challenge to the results by the main opposition parties, Ali, 45, was sworn in for a second term. The governing PPP/C won itself a more comfortable cushion in Parliament–36 of the 65 seats–upping its majority from one to nine. New party WIN (We Invest in Nationhood) won 16, and APNU 12 seats. Former APNU executive member Amanza Walton, who quit and formed Forward Guyana just months before the election, got the one remaining seat.
It was a thumping win for PPP/C. With such a strong showing, the power of the purse, a slew of development projects in the world’s fastest-growing economy, and a country that feels like one big construction site, it’s going to be hard to stop. Even if the Opposition had not splintered, PPP/C had stood a good chance of locking them out of power for more than a generation.
However, while Ali may be the best natural connector in Guyanese politics for decades, there’s a section of the electorate he may never reach–the bloc that convinced itself, implausibly, that the Government was complicit in the tragic death of a child that gripped the national consciousness for months and that it engages in armed targeting of Afro Guyanese. Like MAGA, this bloc has its own information ecosystem, and no accusation is too grave.
This is the bloc that moved to the insurgent party, WIN, which is led by billionaire Azruddin Mohammed, who went into the election with US sanctions and accusations of fraud and smuggling hanging over his head. He denies the charges. WIN pushed APNU into third place and obliterated the Alliance for Change (AFC)–a party comprised mainly of well-known professionals rather than hardened politicos and a significant part of a governing coalition only a decade ago.
The main overriding aim of the WIN block of voters who deserted APNU was to kick out the Government. They effectively fired APNU leader Aubrey Norton from that job. The knock against Mohamed is that he bought votes. I cannot prove the veracity of those claims, but I heard something else from WIN supporters that I talked to. If Mohammed was so willing to use his own money to help them, they reasoned, imagine what he would do with the resources of the oil-rich State.
Buying support is the easy read for WIN’s surge. Vice-President Bharrat Jagdeo, Ali’s closest deputy, pointed to this in his election post-mortem. However, Jagdeo is acknowledged even by his opponents to be the smartest operator in Guyanese politics, and he therefore would know that vote-buying isn’t the whole story of WIN’s showing.
There is a strongly held perception by their supporters that the Government has not shared the oil wealth equally. One of the most important jobs of Irfaan 2.0 is governing as he promised he would in his inauguration–inclusively, and tangibly.
To be continued.
