Beware of the PPPC!

Aug 16, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPPC) has long been accustomed to playing the saviour of Guyana. But it has a well-established record of political roughhousing as is evident where the PPPC has launched what may well be its nastiest, most unscrupulous election campaign in living memory.

Those with long memories will recall the 1980s, when the PPPC, then in opposition, found common cause with its supposed arch-nemesis, the People’s National Congress (PNC), in tormenting Paul Tennessee’s Democratic Labour Movement (DLM). The PNC supplied the official harassment — the police raids, the intimidation of members — while the PPP outsourced the more kinetic disruptions by breaking up DLM meetings as though democracy were an infection to be stamped out before it spread. As if this were not enough, the PPP slathered the DLM with the convenient Cold War smear as agents of the CIA.

The irony of that era is it was the same DLM, maligned and mauled by the PPP, that kept the Patriotic Coalition for Democracy (PCD) from imploding when GUARD and the Working People’s Alliance (WPA) tried to sabotage the consensus candidate process by denying the PPP the right to name that candidate. In the end, there was no consensus candidate, but the DLM held the PCD together through those quarrelsome months. Until after the final curtain the DLM vanished.

The moral of the story is that when both the PPP and the PNC perceive a threat to their respective fortresses, they will set aside their mutual loathing to crush the interloper. In those days, the common enemy was the DLM. In our present hour, the spectre haunting both parties is the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party, whose presidential candidate, Azruddin Mohamed — AZMO, in the public shorthand — has unnerved the old order simply by daring to exist.

But here the symmetry falters, and not in the way one might expect. The PNCR, whatever else one can say about it, has so far kept itself free of the gutter tactics the PPPC has deployed. In an age when restraint is regarded as a political anachronism, the PNCR has, at least for the moment, resisted the temptation to join the lynch mob.

The PPPC, by contrast, has given itself over entirely to the art of political annihilation. Hooligans are dispatched to disrupt even the most modest of WIN’s gatherings. Humble bottom-house meetings are now considered subversive operations requiring suppression. State agencies have been conscripted as weapons against the Mohamed family. Abroad, the PPPC has used a foreign firm in the United States to weave a conspiracy theory worthy of a pulp novel, falsely linking AZMO to Venezuela and elevating him from a rival candidate to a “national security threat.” It has found common cause with private agents in concocting, almost daily, all manner of conspiracies and machinations against AZMO.

This is desperation in its purest form. In the PPPC’s mind, political survival justifies any method, any lie, any ruin visited upon the opponent. The playbook is as old as the party itself, and it is written in the ink of historical amnesia.

For when the PPPC grows desperate, nastiness is never the ceiling. Horror is always a possible sequel. Peter Taylor, the former editor of the Argosy, and the Abraham family in the 1960s are chilling examples of what happens when this party’s fury graduates from insult to injury. In those cases, the politics of vilification metastasized into something darker, the kind of outcome from which democratic societies seldom recover intact.

And yet, the PPPC seems to have learned nothing from its own history. This political season has seen the resurrection of the old discredited tactic of bludgeoning the opponent into political extinction. And this election the PPPC has been nastier than ever.

In this respect, the attack on WIN is not merely an episode in the current election cycle; it is a specimen of the pathology that has long afflicted Guyana’s politics. It is the belief shared, in varying degrees, by the PPPC that the citizen’s vote is less a choice than a loyalty oath, and that those who attempt to widen the menu of options must be taught, through intimidation or ruin, the folly of their ambition.

When a government calls a political opponent a national security threat without evidence, when it sends its agents to disrupt political meetings, when it turns the machinery of the state into an instrument of partisan vengeance, it is not defending the nation. It is dismantling it, piece by piece, until the only thing left to secure is the party’s own monopoly on power.

The PPPC’s present campaign against WIN is therefore not just the nastiest in its own history. It is the logical culmination of a political tradition that confuses power with principle, and victory with virtue. In the end, the party may succeed in burying AZMO beneath an avalanche of slander and manufactured scandal. But it will do so at the cost of confirming, yet again, the truth that has stalked Guyana’s politics for decades: that for those who rule by fear, the enemy is never just the rival party or the insurgent candidate — it is the very idea that power should be earned, not seized.

(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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• Beware, Democratic Labour Movement, Elections, Peeping Tom, PNC, PPPC

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