The strength in numbers

Sep 22, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Politics is often measured in votes, in the neatness of the tally sheet, in the arithmetic that delivers one party into Office and consigns another to Opposition. But politics, in its truest sense, is not arithmetic; it is chemistry.

It is the strange alchemy that happens when human beings discover themselves in numbers, when they recognise that their cause is not solitary but collective. And when their voices, even if denied the volume of official microphones, find resonance in the chorus of the street.

The We Invest in Nationhood (WIN), having crossed the threshold of parliamentary life, must accept that the chamber it enters will not be its kingdom. Parliament, with its time-honoured rules and its ironclad majorities, will allow WIN its seats, a voice, perhaps even a question or two. But it will not allow WIN power. The Government will dominate the agenda, stifle the debate, and mock those who dissent. The role of WIN’s members in the Assembly will be, at best, that of prophets in the wilderness: earnest, unwelcome, often ridiculed.

WIN has another, more powerful calling: to be a movement. It was not arithmetic but chemistry that gave WIN 109,000 votes. Those ballots were not just ink and paper; they were hopes, grievances, convictions, and, above all, a declaration that citizens wished for something different. Those votes represent the power of the underclasses. If WIN forgets this and reduces itself to the sterile life of parliamentary opposition, it will betray the energy that lifted it from obscurity to significance in three short months.

Already, WIN is being encouraged by the establishment to enter into the small quarrels of letter-writing—to petition banks that closed accounts of its candidates, to seek redress where private decisions trespass on public rights. WIN should resist the temptation. Banks that sought to curry favour with power or acted in cowardly haste deserve not a letter but an abandonment.

Let WIN’s candidates carry their accounts elsewhere and in so doing, expose the folly of institutions that chose complicity over fairness. The strength of numbers is the best rebuke. When customers walk away, the ledger shrinks, and even the most timid banker understands.

But the matter of the banks is only one stone in a vast quarry of injustice. WIN campaigned on issues that stirred a people—the weaponisation of the State against its leaders, the throttling of Opposition voices, the need for fairness in economics and justice in governance. These were not passing slogans but urgent cries. If WIN wishes to remain relevant, it must keep those cries alive in the public square. It must march, not in anger but in dignity. It must assemble, not to disrupt but to remind. It must protest, not to disorder but to bear witness. Numbers, when harnessed peacefully, become a mirror that Government cannot ignore.

The danger for WIN lies not in defeat but in drift. Movements dissolve not because they are vanquished but because they forget themselves. WIN must guard against the slow creep of self-interest—the lure of office, the comforts of parliamentary privilege, the subtle intoxication of being included, however peripherally, in the official machinery. The test of its leadership is whether it can persuade its base that WIN was never only about sanctions, nor about personalities, but about a broader vision: the resurrection of People’s Power.

There is no shortage of causes. There is the cause of fair treatment for its candidates, the cause of transparency in government, the cause of dignity in economic life. There is the defense of rights too easily trampled, and the assertion of freedoms too casually dismissed. Each of these, when pressed in the streets with discipline and persistence, can remind the country that democracy is not measured only in parliamentary votes but in the living energy of its citizens.

History, after all, teaches us that parliaments change little without pressure. The most profound movements of reform have come not from the decorous exchanges within legislative halls but from the stubborn voices outside, demanding to be heard. WIN should know this. Its vitality will be found not in the transcript of debates but in the footsteps of its followers, not in the clipped language of motions but in the banners carried down a street.

To become such a movement requires leadership. WIN’s leaders must rise to this task, for they have already been given the raw material: numbers. One hundred and nine thousand is not a footnote; it is a multitude. It is a force that, if kept alive and mobilised, can turn despair into change.

To its leaders, falls the responsibility of reminding their followers that they are not merely voters who cast a ballot and returned home, but citizens whose work has only just begun. If WIN succeeds in this—if it keeps its base awake, engaged, and peacefully insistent—it can write a new chapter in the nation’s politics. Not a chapter about parliamentary speeches but about the underclasses who found strength in numbers and turned that strength into the quiet, determined power of change.

(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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• opposition, Peeping Tom, Politics, strength in numbers, We Invest in Nationhood

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