The people are watching

Nov 22, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – There is, in every small society, a theatre of justice—a place where the public gathers not merely to witness proceedings but to measure the conduct of those who govern them. In Guyana, this theatre is often literal: the narrow staircases, the choked corridors, the wooden benches worn smooth by years of waiting. It was on such benches, on the lower flat of the Georgetown Magistrates’ Court, that ordinary Guyanese sat on the morning when Nazar Mohamed and his son, Azruddin, were taken for their extradition hearing.

The benches, as if by instinct, had arranged themselves into a gallery of the ordinary: vendors, office clerks, pensioners, the curious unemployed—our unacknowledged national jury. And when the two men were brought through the archway in handcuffs, there was a ripple, a slight tremor.  A murmur rose. Someone inhaled sharply. Someone whispered a name.

Then a woman—middle-aged, with the defiant posture of the long-suffering—said what the others would not. “Why the government don’t leave this man alone?” It was not a plea. It was a summation. And the benches nodded.

This single comment, tossed into the thick air of the court, spoke with the clarity of a verdict. For the people of this country, long practiced in observing the abuses of power, know when advantage is being taken. They know when the weight of the state is being brought down on the backs of individuals not for justice but for intimidation, for politics. And the people reject this, instinctively.

This is, in part, why the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party rose as it did. WIN did not rise on the strength of eloquent leaders or a grand vision of economic transformation. It did not rise on manifestoes. It rose because the public, tired of the familiar cruelties and vindictive habits of governance, recognized that WIN was being targeted.

They saw the PPPC unleash a kind of political bile against the party: the pettiness, the reprisals, the eager harassment. They watched supporters emboldened to confront WIN candidates.

They saw the private financial system weaponized against individuals simply because they dared stand under the wrong banner. Even the Carter Center, normally cautious in its language, described the financial sanctions imposed on WIN candidates as a case of overreach. Overreach is the diplomat’s word for what the ordinary person on the bench would call “bullying.”

And the people saw, too, how agencies of the state moved against the Mohameds. If a poll were taken today, one suspects the public would say that the tax-evasion charges tied to the importation of vehicles were not timed by accident. They would say, in that dry Guyanese way, that “this thing got a smell.” And perhaps, in their quiet speculations, they would even whisper that foreign hands, including American ones, may be guiding the script to contain WIN’s rise and to secure American economic interests.

But whether these suspicions are right or wrong is almost beside the point. What matters is perception. The people of Guyana have lived through abrupt dismissals, midnight raids, harassment, sudden tax audits, arrests and the long tradition of governments punishing dissent. The people recognize a pattern when they see it.

WIN’s support, therefore, was not a romance. It was a solidarity vote, born out of the moral reflex of a small nation. For even the powerless man who sits quietly and says nothing knows when another is being kicked while down. The powerless man cannot stop the kick. But he can remember it. And he can vote.

And the people also know—because Guyanese people always know—who is the chief architect of the PPPC’s vindictive politics. They whisper the name in villages and call it openly in minibuses. They see the fingerprints on every act of political suffocation. And they will, eventually, turn against this person. They always do. This is the small corrective mechanism of the society: the slow accumulation of resentment, the quiet noting of wrongs, the sudden turning away.

If the PPPC continues down this campaign of nastiness, intimidation, and the use of state power to pursue personal vendettas, it may find itself not triumphant but displaced in 2030. Parties do not lose elections because of policy miscalculations; they lose because the people, who watch everything, decide that a government has become a bully. And when the people have had enough, their judgment arrives not with noise but with a quiet, devastating certainty.

The benches in the courthouse that morning were not only an audience. They were a warning. The people are watching.

(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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• Georgetown, Magistrates’ Court, office clerks, pensioners, vendors

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