The PPPC is at its nastiest ever

Jan 06, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – The PPPC has always possessed a talent for meanness. It is a party that learned early that power, once acquired, must be defended not by persuasion but by pressure; not by confidence but by cruelty.

Over the years, it refined this instinct into a habit. Political opponents were not to be debated, merely broken. Careers were to be smeared, lives made uncomfortable, reputations nibbled to death by insinuation. This was the party’s grammar of rule. Yet even within that sordid tradition, what we are now witnessing marks a new low. The PPPC is at its nastiest ever.

There is now the unsettling sense that the PPPC is no longer content merely to dominate its rivals, but is determined to outdo Burnham himself in the art of political persecution.  Burnham felt threatened and lashed out. But the PPPC is driven by raw spite and the urge to punish its rivals and has turned political harassement into policy and vindictiveness into a governing principle.

The PPPC has walked this past before, though never quite so grotesquely staged. Paul Tennessee of the Democratic Labour Movement was hounded with an intensity and attacked in PPPC strongholds. C. N. Sharma was pursued with a zeal that suggested a vendetta. These episodes were ugly, but they still pretended to operate within a recognizable framework: the selective use of institutions, the strategic leaking of accusations, the slow grinding down of an adversary until exhaustion replaced resistance. The present campaign against the Mohammed family abandons even that pretence.

What distinguishes this moment is not merely the target but the method. The PPPC has moved beyond political harassment into something darker and more reckless. Thugs  have been unleashed to disrupt WIN party gatherings, as if intimidation were now an accepted form of public engagement. State agencies, which exist to serve the law and the public, are accused of being weaponized, bent from their purpose and repurposed as instruments of partisan punishment. This is no longer politics; it is the conversion of the state into a cudgel.

But even this did not prepare the country for the latest descent. No one expected the ruling party to reach the point where it appears to encourage people to invade and squat on lands privately owned by the Mohameds. This is not simply vindictiveness; it is nihilism. It is an invitation to disorder. When earth-moving equipment can be brought onto private property with apparent political blessing, the signal is unmistakable: ownership is provisional, law is optional, and power decides everything.

This is the moment when the quarrel ceases to be about one family or one party. The orchestrated encouragement of illegal occupation of private lands should alarm every Guyanese who owns so much as a house lot. Land is the most basic assurance of stability in a fragile society. Undermine it, and everything else follows. The PPPC seems either oblivious to this truth or arrogant enough to believe that chaos can be carefully contained, that lawlessness will obediently limit itself to approved enemies.

History offers a brutal corrective. Zimbabwe did not collapse overnight. It slid. It began with political grudges, clothed in the language of redress. It proceeded to land seizures, tolerated and then celebrated by those in power. What followed were rapes, murders, dislocation, and the hollowing out of an economy that never recovered. Thousands fled. Those who remained inherited a country stripped of confidence and capital. Guyana should shudder at the comparison, yet the spectre is unmistakable.

Imagine the consequences if this logic spreads. If today it is Mohammed land, tomorrow it could be anyone’s. Once the principle is established that political favour determines property rights, there is no natural stopping point. Squatters will not consult party lists. Opportunism does not respect ideology. Eventually, even lands owned by those connected to the PPPC will be fair game. At that stage, the party will discover what every reckless regime eventually learns: anarchy is a fire that consumes its arsonists last, but it consumes them all.

There are already whispers of another dangerous turn: allegations that officials seeking to uphold the law are being transferred or sidelined. If true, this would confirm that the rot has reached the marrow. A state that punishes legality and rewards lawlessness is not governing; it is decaying in real time.

The PPPC should pause, if it still can. Vindictiveness masquerading as strength is a fatal error. A party that believes it can terrorize its opponents into submission eventually finds that it has also terrorized the future.

Guyana deserves better than this diabolical course. If the country slides into land seizures, disorder, and flight, the verdict of history will be unambiguous. It will not be kind, and it will not forget.

(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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• nastiest, Peeping Tom, political opponents, PPPC

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