From glory to disgrace!

Sep 05, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – WIN has achieved what no one thought possible. In a few short months it not only muscled its way into the National Assembly but also reduced APNU, that once fearsome leviathan, to a whimpering relic. It should have been a moment for champagne, for victory laps, for speeches about a new dawn. Instead, like a half-wit drunk on its own cleverness, WIN has managed to make itself look ridiculous.

The absurdity begins with its leader, AZMO. The man should be walking on air, parading his 16 seats. Instead, he is muttering darkly about “irregularities”. The very election that saw a fantastic performance from WIN, he now says, is tainted.

One must ask whether the irregularities so selective, so sophisticated, that they allowed WIN to displace APNU but somehow conspired against it in other corners? This is the sort of double-speak one expects from losers, not from men who, by any measure, have just performed a political miracle.

There are, to be fair, complaints worth making. International observers noted the imbalance in campaign financing. AZMO, if he had sense, would have seized on that theme. But he will not. None of them will. Because campaign financing reform would mean opening the books, naming the donors, unmasking the benefactors. And no political party in Guyana – whether WIN, APNU, AFC, or the entrenched PPPC – wishes to expose the sources of their campaign financing.

Nor is AZMO wrong to grumble about the intimidation and harassment his fledgling movement faced on the hustings. The PPPC deployed the police as though they were an extension of its campaign team, stopping his convoy, curtailing his reach. These were the dirty tricks of incumbency, and they should be called out.

But having registered these complaints, AZMO loses all credibility when he leaps, without producing the evidence, to the charge that polling day itself was corrupt. On the very Facebook pages that trumpet his name, there were posts celebrating the smoothness of the process. Now, with a whiff of triumph in his nostrils, he claims otherwise.

One has seen this pantomime before. APNU and the AFC performed it in 2020. Then too, the polls were declared peaceful, only for the losers to suddenly discover battalions of dead men voting, migrants casting ghostly ballots from New York and Toronto. It was dishonourable then, and it is dishonourable now. AZMO, in aping that posture, reveals the hollowness of his politics. The new messiah of opposition politics turns out to be little more than a mimic, parroting the script of the discredited old guard.

Even more contemptible is the muttering from WIN’s camp that the PPPC could not possibly have won Region Four. This is straight from the APNU playbook. But APNU’s leaders, faced with imminent irrelevance, at least have the excuse of desperation. Aubrey Norton knows that his own political future in on the line and he is not likely to escape that reckoning.

AZMO has no such excuse. He has just humiliated APNU and given the PPPC a scare. Yet instead of basking in the glow, he trudges down the same paranoid path, bleating about irregularities.

What, then, explains this self-sabotage? Perhaps, just maybe, it is the more sordid explanation blared by the PPPC that WIN was never about national political renewal but about the Mohameds, about sanctions, about using politics as a lever. If that theory holds, then the election, for WIN, was indeed a zero-sum game. For it would mean that it was not about 16 seats or displacing APNU; it was about ensuring that the machinery of the State might, one day, be under the control of AZMO. In such a scenario, if he did not win outright, the venture failed. In that case, the complaints of irregularities are merely the cry of a gambler who has lost his final bet.

Whatever the motive, the result is the same. AZMO tarnishes his own achievement. Instead of being remembered as the man who in months reshaped Guyana’s opposition landscape, he risks being dismissed as another crank, another voice in the chorus of grievance that has long disfigured the country’s politics. His supporters, who believed they were backing freshness and audacity, may well feel betrayed. For nothing is more infuriating than watching one’s champion imitate the very vices he was supposed to vanquish.

WIN had the chance to break with the past. It could have risen above the muck of conspiracy and recrimination, could have stood as proof that a new political culture was possible. Instead, it has chosen to crawl into the same swamp, repeating the same complaints, the same hypocrisies, the same contempt for the intelligence of the Guyanese people. What began as triumph now curdles into farce.

(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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• APNU, National Assembly, Peeping Tom, win

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