Waiting for a different wind

Jun 24, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – In Guyana, politics used to be a simpler affair—if politics anywhere can ever be called simple. There was a time, not too far gone, when the general elections felt like a two-man race: familiar figures, Burnham and Jagan; familiar platforms PNC and PPP; familiar disappointments.

The People’s Progressive Party and the People’s National Congress (PNC), each armed with their battalions of loyalists, marched voters to the polls like clockwork. As for the smaller parties, they made cameos—charming, tragic, sometimes eccentric—before exiting with barely a ripple.

But today, the ballot has become crowded. We are witnessing a proliferation of small parties, each one bearing an acronym and a dream, each one peddling its variation on a promise that sounds suspiciously like the last. They appear on talk shows and livestreams, offering earnest faces and vague assurances. They swear they are different. They swear they are new. But the more they speak, the more they seem like cousins at a family reunion—dressed differently, but all of the same bloodline.

This bloom of political options might seem, to the untrained eye, like progress. It is not. It is more of the same, only in miniature. The Guyanese voter, patient as he is weather-worn, sees through it. The overwhelming support still flows toward the titans, not because they have earned it, but because they have inherited it—the legacy of ethnic voting and resigned hope. The PPP/C and PNCR remain the gravitational centers of our democracy, and the small parties, however sincere, orbit them like decorative moons.

The tragedy, if one is inclined to call it that, is not merely that the electorate resists change. It is that the change being offered is no change at all. A parade of small parties, each wedded to the same economic orthodoxy, does not constitute choice—it constitutes redundancy. For all their claims to innovation, 90 percent of the political hopefuls in this country are cut from the same neoliberal cloth. They speak in the language of markets and growth, of private enterprise and “investment-friendly environments.” It is the lingua franca of international consultants and downtown boardrooms, not of the cane-cutter, the seamstress, or the man hawking genips on Regent Street.

Neoliberalism, like rain in the tropics, is everywhere and understood by no one. It promises freedom and delivers instability. In Guyana, it has meant grand projects for the investor class and tighter belts for everyone else. The waterfront may gleam, but the hinterland school still leaks. A hotel breaks ground while people are still forced to seek private health care for major illnesses and half of our students are failing their school-leaving examinations. And the political parties, big and small, call this development.

This is the quiet consensus of our political elite. They may bicker about roads and recounts, but they agree on the fundamentals. They agree that the role of government is to stimulate business, not serve people. They agree that the poor must be patient, and that the market will, in its own mysterious time, lift all boats—though the small man owns no boat, and is likely wading.

The outcome, of course, is stasis. Not the stasis of silence, but of noise without movement. An election in Guyana resembles a cricket match played on a muddy field. Much shouting, some movement, but no real progress. Even if, by some miracle, a coalition of small parties were to gain traction—or win, God help them—the ideology would remain intact. Different folks, same strokes. Different players, same tune. Voting for most of the parties is voting for the same system. Whichever party wins, neo-liberalism and capitalism are victorious. The system is the problem. And so long as neo-liberalism wins, the small man loses. And so the small man waits. He waits not for an election, but for a rupture. He waits for a movement that speaks in a language other than GDP and foreign direct investment. He waits for a politics of bread and butter, of health and housing. He waits, not always in hope, but in necessity—because survival is not a platform, it is a condition.

One does not wish to be cynical. Cynicism is cheap and usually lazy. But realism, like a well-tuned bicycle, can carry one far. The reality is that the structure of Guyana’s economy has been captured by a class that profits from things as they are. This is not a conspiracy; it is a system. And systems do not fall because a new party is formed. They fall when people stop believing in their inevitability. There may yet come a time when a different kind of politics flowers here—unseen until the season is right. But until then, we will vote, and shout, and grumble, and go back to our lives. The names on the ballot will multiply, but the options will not. The poor man, the small man, will remain just that. Small, and waiting. Waiting for the crack in the wall.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• Burnham, disappointments, Election, Jagan, Peeping Tom, Politics

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