The last tango in Albion

Jul 21, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – It was supposed to be a show of strength. A colossus of a political rally. A sea of red, an ocean of supporters, and possibly, if one of the speakers had his way, an earthquake of 8.3 on the Richter scale caused entirely by synchronised clapping, cheering and flag-waiving in favor of national development and imported asphalt. But something curious happened on the way to the coronation.

You see, the People’s Progressive Party Civic held what they touted as a mega rally in Albion—yes, Albion, that rustic hamlet where sugar once reigned and now survives mostly on nostalgia and subsidies. The party faithful gathered. Well, some of them. A few others had something come up—like existential dread or a better offer from the food stall down the road.

Now, if you listened to the speakers, you’d have thought it was a sold-out CPL match at Providence meeting, a sold-out crowd at Queens Park Oval. “Twenty-five thousand people!” one roared with the triumphant air of a man who’d just taught a goat to play the violin. But if you looked down from a drone—or even stood on a modestly tall cooler—you’d see more space than in a yoga retreat. Frankly, if 25,000 people were really there, then 20,000 of them were hiding behind a sugar cane stalk.

The PPPC, which once evoked mass adulation and sent crowds into a trance-like euphoria with its slogans, now evokes something closer to vague indigestion. People aren’t coming out in the numbers anymore—not because they don’t care, but because they’ve grown weary. Weary of Thursday tirades that sound less like press conferences and more like angry therapy sessions. Weary of seeing rich contractors take away the little pittances that they should be getting. Weary of vitriol disguised as vision, and policies wrapped in personal vendettas. Weary of hearing the same old talk while they wonder whether they are living in an alternate reality.

But let’s not ignore the elephant in the room—or in this case, the smug mammoth on the stage. Yes, the real reason for the rally’s underwhelming attendance may have been sitting right there under the spotlight at Albion. But he was not grinning. He did not look like a man who was brimming with confidence. For the most part when he looked at the crowd, he must have felt disappointed. This explains why he was so grim throughout it all.

There he was— the man also known as His Loquaciousness, The Thursday Thunderer, and The Man Who Knows Everything, Including What You Had for Lunch. If you’re wondering why the crowds are thinning, just listen to one of his press conferences. They go on longer than “War and Peace” and are only slightly more uplifting.

There’s something about being lectured weekly on how the press is wrong, the opposition is wrong, the international community is misinformed, and anyone who disagrees is either corrupt, confused, or in cahoots with someone who once sneezed in an APNU meeting.

The great irony, of course, is that Mr. Know-it-All may be the single most effective force in reducing PPP rally turnout—an unintentional recruitment officer for the opposition. One imagines some poor PPP campaign planner muttering, “If only we could get him to talk less.” But that’s like asking the Atlantic not to be moist.

This isn’t to say the man lacks passion. Passion he has. But the tone! The delivery! Like a professor who doesn’t realise all his students dropped the course halfway through the semester. It’s all very intense, very accusatory, and leaves the listener feeling as though the opposition has no good in it or any possibility of redemption.

The truth is, people want hope, not hostility. They want vision, not vengeance. And they’re beginning to recognise that something is off. And when the party faithful turn up at the rallies and see people from all over at their rally, they must begin to ask the same question their leaders are asking: where are the Berbicians. They know too that the magic of the mighty PPPC is fading, and fading before their eyes.

And so, the crowd in Albion did not swell. It sagged. Not because the weather was bad (though the sun was auditioning for the role of The Surface of Mercury) and not because people don’t care—but because the party no longer inspires. The rapture is gone. The romance is over. The rally is, well, flat. The entertainment lacked the electricity and after a few hours in the scorching sun, people were exhausted and tired.

In the end, the biggest unintentional comedy of the night wasn’t the slogans or the speeches—it was the spectacle of a party pretending that it is at its strongest ever. And all the while, the very symbol of its fatigue sat on stage. There he was no doubt aware that the people had already begun their quiet retreat.

If this is the road to 2025, someone forgot to pave it.

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

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• Albion, Peeping Tom, PPP, Tango

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