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Norton – rising or failing

Apr 21, 2024 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton has to feel the shadows closing in, hear the footsteps of those stalking him drawing closer.  He came to the leadership role amid great expectations: the fighter needed the inspiration to lift disillusioned Guyanese to new ground.  Years later, he is still to deliver.  Now, the challengers are assembling, showing their hand.  Though Norton has his strengths and his cohort of loyalists, he looks vulnerable, a leader that is beatable.

We look at his tenure to this junction and are forced to grope for his accomplishments.  What are they and where are they?  Out of sheer necessity, one of his first tasks had to be unifying the uneasy factions in the PNC.  This he has not done, which is clear from the arrival of the first challenger, of whom we believe there will be more.  The question is how much he put into building internal bridges, winning people over to his vision, getting buy-in with his strategies.  What are those, if we may ask?  On the vital oil and gas sector, the Opposition has lagged far behind, and always seems to be catching up, leaving it out of touch, even an irrelevancy in the one national development that has all the components to be a national difference maker for the better.  The Guyana people need this to happen, and the Opposition should have been the catalyst, with the Leader of the Opposition, Aubrey Norton, in the driver’s seat.  The backseat has been the position to which he has been stuck, which he seems to favour.  The times require that Norton transform himself into the political presence that Guyanese desperately need, so that this oil wealth can be converted to the life that all citizens should be guaranteed, begin to experience.  He has been conspicuously content to hesitate and put up a wall.  That can never do, never get his people anywhere, and if there is one thing that he should know, it is that reality.

On the issue of race, Mr. Norton faces a formidable barrier.  He does not have crossover appeal, and for a group that lacks the advantage of numbers, the labours to close the gap have been less than encouraging.  What has been done there, and what is there to show for efforts?  Guyanese of all political persuasions are disgruntled and angry at the PPP/C Government; they see Vice President Jagdeo in the poorest of light.  These are gifts of immeasurable value to any opposition, but Norton has been sluggish and awkward in capitalizing, an abject failure here.  Much time has elapsed and his time for making headway in the most sensitive areas all but gone.  Looking back at oil, the Opposition Leader appears more focused on staying in the good books of ExxonMobil at all costs.  There is his noticeable reluctance to say or do anything that would prompt the company to view him as a concern, probably blank him out.  In the tossup between pleasing the people of ExxonMobil and galvanizing his own people, the conclusion is that the company has been the winner hands down.

Aubrey Norton has been on the move, but the more he moves, the more he remains in the same place.  Some cautious noises have been made with oil, but what is his endgame.  What is his overall programme? That is, if he has one.  Amid the gloom for Norton, there is a silver lining.  His first challenger, what are the accomplishments that he can point to and call his own.  What is it that separates Mr. Roysdale Forde, SC, from Mr. Norton, and is sufficiently distinctive to give agitated and discontented Guyanese some hope?  Looking at the wider political arena, there is Bharrat Jagdeo, and the less that Guyanese hear of him, and have to do with him, the better it is for them.  Many have reached this stage across Guyana.  It is fertile ground that demands a man of wisdom and deep acumen to drive through the opening, his opponent’s weakness.  Norton has not been that man so far.  When he has Jagdeo on the ropes, he has been busy picking himself off the canvas.  Time is passing; Norton may have missed his chance.

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