Opposition – was it ever really in the elections

Sep 12, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The opposition political parties prior to the 2025 elections must be measured and stripped of their props. Then put under the harshest spotlight. I call no names. What’s the point?  Where’s the value?  In this sweeping glance at the two major opposition parties, my hard assessment follows.  Not so much their performance, but focusing on what was before them.  How they managed demands on intellect, character, on elections terrain like never before, and then one more element.  It’s that most nonnegotiable of circumstances, at which both major opposition parties failed abjectly.  It was the expectations of Guyanese, primarily their support bases.

Fact and Circumstances One. 

It perplexes.  It shocks.  There were the two major opposition parties wrangling and tangling about division of electoral spoils.  Since that was their raison d’etre, their report card condemns.  Beyond bad.  Embarrassingly and humiliatingly, because of the paramountcy of one consideration: WHAT IS IN IT FOR ME.  Me!   Me!  Me!  My reaction is: WTF.  This couldn’t be those heralded as noblemen of Guyana.  But they were.  Who was going to get what and who was going to get such?  Guyanese gave them what they deserved, especially their own sickened, appalled, and bent double supporters.

Fact and Circumstances Two. 

While all the bickering and the internal seesaws were unfolding, the reality was of a divided and weakened opposition.  An opposition contestant whose only chance at being competitive, of taking the fight to the incumbents, was dissipated to naught when they couldn’t find a mutually attractive formula to participate in the elections together.  One doesn’t need advanced education, or even to be a dog, to know that to go into the elections separately was a disaster before it began.  The outcome has since confirmed.  Something else must be said, and since it has to be sharply and unyieldingly, then so be it.  What happened to public service, and the dedication and sacrifices of those given more, for the betterment of those with less, oftentimes nothing?  In America, men have gone to war, risk their lives, for an ideal.  Does Guyana not have such men and women?  I labored long, and come up short: Hell no, Guyana has very few of such citizens.  There’s Israel.  Individuals not even born there, still have that spiritual connection that compels them to lay everything on the line for nothing.  For nothing.  In Guyana, the split had better be right, or no takers.  Going it alone wasn’t suicidal.  It was asinine.  No one needs any schooling to reach there.

Fact and Circumstances Three. 

I put the best face on going separately, and assertions that the groups would still be competitive.  People can make asses of Guyanese willing to be taken on that ride.  Exclude me.  Now, there’s this interest.  I searched long and hard to discern the energies and strategies of the political opposition sans WIN on the hustings of the 2025 elections.  If there was a strategy, what was it?  If there was much energy, it wasn’t visible to me.  The record of the two groups in the last few months before elections were overpowered and overshadowed by their destructions from within, and how pathetic it left them on the outside.  Who would vote for a group, or groups, that couldn’t get their own house in order?  If not one’s own house, then how mastery of the demands of the national house?  It had to be some desperate voters, blindly loyal voters, and Guyanese hoping against hope who placed their dreams and aspirations in these characters.  Some did, and it didn’t amount to much of anything, other than to make official the dreadfulness of the opposition champs.

Fact and Circumstances Four. 

What were the five defining issues that the opposition camps made their calling card in the elections?  Or three signature issues?  Or, drop dead issues, regardless of what that required?  Biometrics, bloated list, cost-of-living, and corruption were heard, then nothing.  They surfaced as agenda items, then faded.  Until next week.  Echoes at press conferences, then silence.  Those had to gain muscle, then made into a 24/7 machine.  By the book and then not.  If they were operating in good faith, they strategised heavily, then paralysed themselves immovably.

Now two points are put before Guyanese, who I ask to think.  First, I do not believe that the two major opposition parties were ever truly, genuinely competing in the 2025 elections.  Their participation was a pretense, their efforts a false dawn.  What do Guyanese believe?  Then this: which opposition group was conducting a false flag operation in the 2025 elections?  False flag has another name -Trojan Horse.  Finally, there’s this: was the incoherence and impotence of the opposition not accidental, but self-inflicted?  Today, I hear they’ll be better, stronger.  For whom?  Themselves or the people.  Only fools would fall for that claptrap.

(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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• Elections, GHK Lall, opposition

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