The road not taken

Jul 09, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – History, which forgets more than it remembers, may overlook that in the long-drawn impasse of Guyana’s 2020 elections, President David Granger stood before two roads, and chose the one less disastrous for the country. For that alone, he deserves more than the vitriol of hindsight.

In the present election season, thick with bile and the drumbeat of power, it is easy now, and fashionable even among the supporters of the PNCR to portray Granger as weak. Yet such judgments are made without recalling just how close Guyana stood to the abyss and the debt that is owed to the former President for not taking us over the precipice.

David Granger had two options. The first path was the road of defiance. Granger could have called the bluff of the US, Canada and the EU. Sanctions, after all, are the paper swords of modern diplomacy—wielded often, feared less. A recent analysis from Chatham House, no cheerleader for autocracy, shows that the efficacy of sanctions in reversing political outcomes or restoring democracy is more illusion than record. They hobble economies, yes, but rarely steer political repentance.

David Granger could have chosen to ignore the muttering of diplomats and the threats of visa bans. He could have embraced the script already written by some of his comrades in the APNU+AFC—those architects seeking a judicial coup, those whose imaginations had long since abandoned constitutionalism for control. It would not have taken much for there to be a little taste of Belarus in the tropics. GECOM was strained and the opposition fatigued.

But David Granger chose another way. He clung to a constitutional orthodoxy that was out of fashion even within his own circle. He maintained, from the beginning, that GECOM remained the sole constitutional authority empowered to declare the winner. And he stuck with that position, even as weeks turned to months.

Yes, five months is a lifetime in politics. His refusal to bring the matter to a close sooner may be cause for criticism. But in those five months, Granger also played a long, disciplined hand. He allowed the courts to function. He allowed CARICOM, the OAS, and even the now-maligned observers to speak and record. He allowed time—however slowly—to strip bare the motives of those within his camp who saw power not as a covenant with the people but as a private property to be defended at any cost.

And when the final declaration came, he stepped aside.

The knives came swiftly and from within. Like Desmond Hoyte before him in 1992, and again in 1997, Granger committed the cardinal sin of postcolonial politics: he put country before cabal. He denied the fantasy of the eternally ruling party. He said, in essence, that power unmoored from legitimacy is a form of theft, not governance. For this, he became the target of a political mutiny.
The PNCR did not forgive him. They pushed him out. They maligned his name, privately at first and then later publicly, as they still do today. They even had the temerity to question his loyalty.

Today, they are reaping the rewards of their actions. Today, they walk around the rubble of a party more fractured than at any point in its history. The same factions that urged Granger to defy the constitution now grumble about the weakness of the party. But it was not Granger who weakened the PNCR. It was their own disdain for order, their own contempt for lawful loss.

History is not sentimental. It has little time for caution or care. It prefers the noise of revolution, the charisma of brutes, the clarity of betrayal. Granger gave it none of that. He preferred the deliberation of courts to the battle cries of mobs. And so, he will likely be remembered as an afterthought. But for one moment, perhaps the most perilous since the restoration of democracy in Guyana, he held the line.

We often speak of legacies in grand terms: of roads built, of hotels opened or of bridges constructed. But sometimes a legacy is a thing undone—a coup not taken, a country not broken, a democracy not disgraced. For all his failings, and there were many, David Granger walked away. In a time when so many others would have grasped for permanence, he surrendered to the will of the people, as declared—however late—by GECOM.

That may not earn him a monument. But it should at least spare him our disrespect.

(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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• David Granger, Guyana, Peeping Tom, PNCR

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