Why APNU was decimated by WIN

Sep 08, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The news out of Region 10 is not merely a tremor; it is an earthquake. A mere two years ago, A Partnership for National Unity (APNU) sat fat and content, winning fourteen of sixteen seats in the Linden municipality. The party was basking in what it thought was an impregnable fortress. Today, the fortress lies breached, its walls broken down not by the governing PPP, but by a new and untested force—We Invest in Nationhood, known simply as WIN.

The APNU leadership has offered explanations, but explanations, like alibis, often tell you more about the speaker than about the crime. We are told that a “vacuum” developed, and WIN slipped neatly into it. But one must ask, with Region 10 still under APNU’s hand at the level of the Regional Democratic Council, where was this vacuum supposed to be? If there was an empty space, it was not geographic; it was moral, political, and spiritual. And it was not created by WIN. It was created by APNU itself.

We are told, too, that WIN prospered because money was lathered in the Region. That may sound convincing in a rum shop but does not withstand the faintest of scrutiny. If money buys votes, then why did those lathered bills not wash away PPPC strongholds? Why did WIN’s advance falter in PPPC strongholds while surging in Linden and Region 10? The answer is that money may lubricate the machinery of politics, but it cannot stir a disillusioned heart.

The truth is plainer and harder than the excuses. APNU was defeated because its supporters grew weary of it. Factionalism is an ugly word, but uglier still is the spectacle of a party eating itself alive. The removal of David Granger was not simply a change of leadership; it was a declaration of war within the family. Granger, for all his faults, had pulled the PNCR back from the brink after its catastrophic loss in 2006. He stitched together a coalition that toppled the PPPC in 2015. Yet within his own party, the very hands that once lifted him turned against him.

The consequences were fatal. By the time the 2025 elections came, APNU had splintered. Its leaders looked not outward to the people but inward at each other, measuring spoils, plotting ousters, testing daggers. Granger warned against factionalism. But the new leadership intoxicated with seizing the party did not address the factionalism which Granger warned against. A party in that condition cannot win an election; it cannot even fight one properly. What the electorate saw in APNU was not a coalition of parties. What they saw was the PNCR being splintered and besieged by quarrels. And people, being sensible, turned away.

If APNU collapsed under the weight of its own divisions, WIN rose on the buoyancy of something different: a movement of the underclass. WIN was not built in offices, but in streets, in poor villages where voices rise louder than radios. It was not designed to impress investors; it was designed to speak to the working man and woman who felt unseen, unheard, and perpetually cheated.

APNU’s natural base found in WIN what they no longer found in their old party: an energy that was theirs, unpolished, rough, but alive. WIN was not a machine; it was a crowd, and crowds are hard to resist. Even Bharrat Jagdeo, never a man to give an opponent an inch without clawing back two, admitted that WIN made inroads into PPPC’s support. But there, the fortress held. The PPPC has always been more disciplined in protecting its base, more vigilant against the little cracks that let the water in. WIN knocked at those doors but found them barred.

In Region 10, however, the doors had been left swinging on their hinges. APNU had assumed permanence. And permanence in politics is always the beginning of impermanence. What makes WIN’s rise striking is not merely its electoral showing, but its spirit. It is not suited to parliamentary politics; it is a party of the marginalised and neglected. And therein lies its strength and its danger. AZMO, its leader, would be mistaken to measure success in seats in the National Assembly. WIN’s strength is in its ability to bring parliament to the people, not the people to parliament. Parliament will neuter WIN.

One does not need to romanticize the underclass to recognize its power. It is the underclass that builds the roads, provide the labour of construction, mines the ore, harvests the crops, drives the minibuses and sells on the pavements. It has now found its voice and discovered its strength in a new movement. And so APNU was decimated, not by fraud, nor by cash, nor by a vacuum filled, but by its own decay and by the rise of a movement that spoke in a language the ‘scrapes’ could understand. It is fashionable in politics to look for complicated answers, but sometimes the simplest one is best:  the poor and marginalized turn away from leaders who no longer inspire them and they find their voice in WIN.

(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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• developed, Factionalism, moral, political, Regional Democratic Council, spiritual, vacuum, win

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