They will come for your piece of the pie eventually

Jan 05, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – For months now, the move by the PPPC against the Mohameds has been presented—by AZMO himself and by sympathetic commentators as a crude act of political vendetta. The narrative goes like this: the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPPC) is terrified of the electoral rise of We Invest in Nationhood (WIN); WIN is almost exclusively bankrolled by the Mohameds; therefore, the state is being weaponised to destroy the Mohameds and, by extension, to strangle WIN in its cradle.

It is a neat story. It is also a deeply flawed one.

If the PPPC were genuinely afraid of WIN as an electoral force, the timeline alone collapses the argument. The most vicious actions against the Mohameds predate AZMO’s formal entry into the presidential race. One cannot logically argue that a party moved to crush a political threat that had not yet declared itself in electoral terms. Political vendettas tend to follow political events, not precede them. The electoral evidence further weakens the claim. WIN did make inroads into traditional PPPC support. But those inroads were marginal, not existential. In fact, despite WIN’s participation, the PPPC secured almost 10,000 more votes in the 2025 elections than it did in 2020. That is not the behaviour of a party whose base is collapsing under assault. It is evidence of a base that largely held firm.

Nor does the familiar fallback explanation, that the PPPC is acting under American pressure adequately explain the intensity and singular focus of the campaign against the Mohameds. External pressure is not new. The PPPC has been “pushed” before, sometimes forcefully, but it has never unleashed this level of sustained institutional ferocity against any local actor. Something else is at work.

To understand what that something is, one has to move beyond the surface politics and examine the structure of power itself. This requires engaging with the concept of elite capture of the state. Elite capture refers to a condition in which a narrow economic oligarchy comes to dominate policymaking, bending it to serve private accumulation rather than public interest. Elections still occur, parties still compete, and political rhetoric still flows, but the real decisions about who thrives and who is destroyed are made in private dens, not party executive meetings or within the government.

The Mohameds complicate this picture precisely because they occupy an unusual position. They are unquestionably part of Guyana’s economic elite. For decades, they bankrolled the PPPC and other parties, hedging their bets as rational capitalists do. But they were never fully integrated into the inner oligarchic circle that has come to capture the state and that maintains intimate proximity to a powerful PPPC leader. They were elite, but not oligarchic. Wealthy, but not dominant.

That distinction matters.

As Guyana’s economy expands, the space available for elite accumulation widens. Oil revenues, construction, foreign exchange flows, gold, and imports create enormous opportunities. During periods of rapid growth, different elite factions can coexist, each feeding at a growing trough. But capitalism has a brutal rhythm: growth eventually flattens. When it does, accumulation becomes zero-sum. Expansion gives way to consolidation. And consolidation requires displacement. It is at this stage that economic warfare usually begins. But this consolidation can also be commenced early in anticipation in recognition that a private empire may take time to crumble and may need to be attacked to crumble. The Mohameds occupied strategic economic spaces. They were among the largest private buyers of gold in Guyana. They were also the largest private buyers and sellers of foreign currency. These positions are not incidental. Control over gold has certain advantages to the elites that have captured the ruling party. Control over foreign exchange allows indirect influence over the cost of doing business across the economy. These are not merely commercial advantages; they are levers of systemic power.

An expanding oligarchic elite, having captured the state and the ruling party, now covets that space held by the Mohameds. The objective is not political annihilation of the Mohameds but their economic displacement. The politics—the harassment, the weaponsing of state agencies against the Mohameds, the vicious rhetoric, the moral posturing are simply the outward manifestation of a deeper economic struggle. Seen this way, the attack on the Mohameds is not really about WIN. WIN is not being attacked; the Mohamed family is. Nor is this about electoral fear. It is about the reallocation of economic power within an elite class that no longer tolerates independent centres of accumulation beyond its control.

This is how elite capture operates. It does not merely regulate; it eliminates competitors. It does not debate; it dislodges. And it uses the instruments of the state law enforcement, policymaking, and public narrative—to do so. This is why all those rich people who now support the PPPC and believe that the PPPC is for them should be worried. Today it is the Mohameds; tomorrow the economic elite will come for your tiny corner. What is unfolding, therefore, is not political warfare. It is economic warfare dressed up as politics. And until that reality is confronted honestly, the public will continue to mistake symptoms for causes, and chessboard moves for vendettas. The Mohameds are not victims because of their association with WIN. They are victims because they occupied an economic space that the elite wants for 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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• Mohameds, Peeping Tom, PPPC, We Invest in Nationhood

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