The manifesto undid AZMO and the WIN party

Jul 26, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – In politics, it is rarely the great calamities or the tectonic events that bring a man down. More often, it is the small missteps, the whispered advice from overconfident aides, the fumbled response to provocation – it is the banana peel, not the earthquake that sends the politician tumbling.

Such is the fate that now awaits AZMO and his WIN party. What once seemed like a wildfire of populist fervour is about to fizzle. And it all comes down to a mistake – a grave, unnecessary, and avoidable one. AZMO allowed himself to be baited into producing a manifesto.

It is the sort of mistake that suggests AZMO has forgotten, or worse, never fully understood, the source of his appeal. It was never his policies that stirred the masses. His allure came from what he represented – a repudiation of the political status quo, a defiance of the historic domination of local politics by the PPPC and PNCR.  AZMO emerged not as a polished technocrat or a platform politician, but as a figurehead of rejection – a symbol of frustration turned into a movement.

People rallied to AZMO because they saw in him someone who stood outside the charade, someone who had not rehearsed the old lines. He did not speak from behind lecterns or lean on the crutches of political science jargon. He spoke as they do, raw and real, with the urgency of the hungry and the forgotten. He did not just identify with the underclass – he was their voice.

But now, in a spectacular miscalculation – likely crafted by those who believe politics is an academic exercise – AZMO has put out a manifesto. And in doing so, he has waded into the swamp that the PPPC was hoping to lure him into all along. The PPPC has drawn AZMO and his party WIN right where they want him.

They wanted him to be drawn into a battle over policies, figures, and footnotes. And WIM succumbed.

The ruling party was always going to seize this moment. Already, they have begun shredding his manifesto in the public square, mocking its proposals, poking holes in its logic, treating AZMO not as a threat to their power, but as a hapless amateur dabbling in grown-up politics.

But it is not just the PPPC’s ridicule that will hurt him. It is what the manifesto represents: a loss of authenticity. A betrayal, even if unintended, of the very people who saw in him a break from the long condescension of the intellectual class.

AZMO’s core supporters – the lumpen proletariat, the vendors, the hustlers, the underemployed, the poor, the dispossessed, the young people looking for a change – are not moved by white papers and policies. They are moved by need, and by the dream that they might finally be represented by someone who has seen their pain and understand it even though he is considered as one of the richest men in Guyana.

For decades they have listened to manifestoes; all of them have amounted to nothing more than rusting promises. AZMO should have known that manifestoes do not move people anymore. People have long come to be distrustful of the promises and pledges made in them.

In this context, WIN’s manifesto is not a plan. It is a distraction – a signal that AZMO is being reshaped in the image of those he was meant to replace. It tells the dispossessed that he is being coached by the same people who have spent decades talking about them, never to them.

There was a path for AZMO – a path to bring about change and rupture the domination of the PPPC and the APNU. That path did not require a manifesto. It required a message: that the political order is broken and must be swept away. When pressed about plans, he could have spoken broadly about assembling a team, about restoring dignity, about tearing down the machinery that keeps the poor, poor. That would have sufficed.

It is easy to forget, that there was a time when manifestoes were manifestoes were optional. During the turbulent decades of the 1970s and 80s, parties ruled with no printed scripture of intent. They ruled on charisma, on loyalty, and often on fear – but not on the strength of bullet points and policy targets.

By producing a manifesto, AZMO has played into the ruling party’s hands. Worse, he has stepped away from the thing that made him electric: the sense that he was not like the others. Now he is just another third force trying to be taken seriously. And we know what happens to third forces in Guyana. They rise, briefly. Then they vanish.

The WIN party was not just another political vehicle. It was an outcry, a rupture in the binary of PPP and PNC. It had the texture of a protest, not a campaign. And like most protests, its strength was not in its plans, but in its defiance.

But AZMO was badly advised. He took the bait. And history will record this not as the moment he matured into a politician, but as the moment he began to fall.

What follows will be familiar. The ruling party will press harder. The media will shift from intrigue to ridicule. His base, disillusioned, will drift. And soon, the WIN party will become what it was never meant to be: another footnote in the long, weary chronicle of Guyanese politics.

All because of one small, fatal mistake – he allowed himself to be baited.

(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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• AZMO, Azruddin Mohamed, Election, Manifesto, Peeping Tom, WIN Party

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