The man they made

Sep 11, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – There is a curious way in which politics often produces unintended results. A man known as AZMO, once known chiefly for his generosity, now finds himself leading a party that has disrupted the old political arrangement and left the People’s Progressive Party/Civic to wonder whether its own heavy hand did not, in fact, cultivate the very force that now confronts it.

It is not as if AZMO arrived from nowhere. He and his family have for decades been known as givers, patrons, dispensers of charity to causes both great and small. Guyanese are not unacquainted with benevolence—there are many who give quietly—but the scale and consistency of the AZMO family’s philanthropy has been unmatched.

The charity was not, as the PPPC has sought to represent, a calculated strategy to soften up the political ground. It was, rather, a habit. Charity, for the Mohameds was less about ambition and more about human kindness. But good works rarely translate automatically into political capital. A man who is known for giving schoolchildren shoes or funding hospital wards is not thereby presumed fit to govern a country. And AZMO, for all his wealth of giving, was not initially known for political pedigree. If anything, he lacked the qualities that politicians traditionally flaunt. He was not magnetic. He did not speak with the charisma of a rally orator. He was, in many ways, ordinary.

The story changed not because of what he did, but because of what was done to him. Governments, when seized by suspicion, have a way of turning molehills into mountains. The PPP/C saw menace where there was, at most, murmured possibility. A few persons whispered over market stalls and backyard fences, that perhaps this generous man ought to run for President. A whisper is not a shout. But in the nervous ear of government, whispers can sound like thunder.

And so, one day, a circular went out from the Ministry of Education: schools were not to accept gifts without approval. This edict, written in the flat language of bureaucracy, carried with it the full weight of suspicion. It told the public what the PPP/C feared—that charity might be cover for ambition. If ever a party wished to fan a faint ember into flame, this was it.

What followed was less a strategy than a siege. Sanctions were misrepresented. Overreach became the order of the day. State agencies became instruments of harassment. The private sector was prodded into compliance. The banking and aviation industries suddenly found themselves caught up in the controversy. Charges were filed. brandished. AZMO’s name became a fixture of weekly denunciations.

The people of Guyana, accustomed to the feints and parries of political life, saw something else in this. They saw a man being set upon, not by rivals in open debate, but by the machinery of state itself. And they recoiled, not out of love for AZMO’s speeches—there were none to love—but out of distaste for the spectacle of a government bullying one of its citizens.

Here, as so often in politics, the so-called lumpen proletariat displayed a shrewder instinct than the intellectual class. They recognized persecution when they saw it. They recognized that when a man is kicked while he is down, the decent response is to stand him up. Their solidarity was not born of manifestos or grand ideology but of an ancient, human dislike for unfairness.

Thus, AZMO became a champion of the poor, not by declaration, but by default. Each new measure taken against him confirmed the image: here was the man the rulers feared. Here was the man to rally behind. Had the PPP/C ignored him, he might still be handing out gifts in obscurity. Instead, they made him a household name, and in so doing, they built the scaffolding of his political ascent.

When the votes were counted, the evidence was there in black and white. Sixteen seats. A new party, a new force, a new figure on the stage. The PPP/C, in its zeal to guard against imagined threats, had raised up a real one. It is not often that a ruling party midwifes its own opposition, but in this case the child was delivered by the very hand that sought to strangle it. Now the PPP/C must reckon with its creation. WIN is no longer a whisper. It is a presence, a rival, perhaps even a harbinger of change. The government may regret the paranoia that turned philanthropy into politics, whispers into rallies, and a private citizen into a public challenge. For it is one of the oldest truths of political life that persecution ennobles, and that martyrs are not born but made. And in this instance, the making was done by the PPP/C itself.

(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, Peeping Tom, People’s Progressive Party Civic

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