Sometimes failure is the cleanser

Aug 09, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Sometimes the thing most needed is the thing least wanted. In politics, as in life, there is no straight road to redemption.

In Guyana today, the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) and the Alliance for Change (AFC) stand as examples that failure, humiliating and complete, may be the only route to a second life. These parties, so accustomed to thinking of themselves as guardians of a higher national cause, have long since forfeited any serious claim to democratic legitimacy. If they are to be part of a democratic Guyana in the future, they must, I believe, first disappear.

This is not a death wish; it is a recognition of the laws of political decay. Parties grow tired, corrupt and especially archaic. They become consumed by their own mythologies. The PNCR has lived for decades on the memory of its long, unchallenged hold on power.

It has tried at intervals to reinvent itself — a new name here, a coalition there — but the reinventions have always been skin-deep. In 2011, it dressed itself as the APNU, a broad alliance led by a man, David Granger, whose own reputation was meant to cleanse the party of the stench of its past misdeeds. For a time, it worked. The PNCR emerged in 2015 from the political wilderness, wearing a mask of democratic respectability.

But power revealed the fault lines. The general and regional elections of 2020 unmasked the old instincts. The same party that many assumed so wrongly as breaking with its past, found itself pushing the most absurd of narratives. Those were the stories of migrants and the dead voting, of elections stolen by invisible hands.

But apart from turning against democracy, the party also turned against its leader. The daggers drove Granger from leadership. And the new guard became the loudest peddlers of the discredited narratives. In their hunger for political survival, they dragged the PNCR back into its own shadow.

The AFC’s fate was different only in detail. Born as an insurgent force meant to break the racial arithmetic of Guyanese politics, it carried the promise of a small party that could punch above its weight. That promise dissolved in coalition when the AFC became the junior partner, and complicit witness of the APNU+AFC’s slide into electoral illegitimacy. Its own core support splintered. What was left was neither independent nor credible.

Now, both parties exist in a twilight space. Their bases are factionalised in the PNCR and fragmented in the AFC. The electorate sees only what is obvious: that both have failed to repudiate their complicity in the attempted subversion of the 2020 elections. The faces remain the same, the voices the same, the silences the same. In such a state, it is hard to believe these two parties can be trusted to be part of a democratic process.

Sometimes failure is the cleanser. The electorate, in its own brutal arithmetic, may be the instrument of that cleansing. If in the next elections the PNCR and AFC are humiliated at the polls, reduced to diminished voices in the National Assembly, it will not necessarily be the end of them. It will be the end of the illusions they have lived by.

From that rubble, something better could be built. A new mass-based party could emerge, one that is not weighed down by the habits of the old. It could be a party able to speak to all Guyanese, not just to its traditional faithful. It could reject the easy comforts of traditional-based mobilisation, and instead build credibility on democratic practice. But this new thing cannot be made by preserving the old. The old must fall.

It is for this reason that the PNCR’s refusal to sign the Ethnic Relations Commission’s code of conduct was not surprising. A party that has never believed in free and fair elections cannot be expected to swear allegiance to them now. The comparison is crude but exact: it is like asking the devil to caress a crucifix, or asking Dracula to take a sun bath.

The moralists will say that surely a party can reform without dying. But political history teaches otherwise. Rot runs too deep. The temptation to cling to old loyalties and narratives is irresistible. In Guyana’s political culture, where memory is long and grudges longer, the only real break is a complete break.

The PNCR and the AFC, as they stand, are incapable of contributing to the making of a democratic Guyana. Their instincts are wrong, their leaders compromised, their language poisoned by the past. Yet from their failure can come an opportunity. Not for the resurrection of what was, but for the birth of what has never been: truly democratic opposition parties, untainted by the sins of rigged elections and unburdened by the ghosts of old leaders.

The electorate, patient but not infinitely so, holds the power to force this change. A decisive rejection at the polls, the kind that leaves no room for self-deception, could do what years of hoping have failed to realise. New voices could rise, unafraid to speak the truth about 2020, unafraid to build something not from inherited privilege but from earned trust.
In that way, failure would not be an ending. It would be the necessary beginning.

(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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• cleanser, failure, Peeping Tom, Politics, Redemption

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