The PPPC’s big blunder

Feb 04, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Politics in Guyana is becoming a romantic comedy. It is increasingly looking like a sideshow in which everyone behaves badly, nobody learns anything, and the audience keeps rooting for the person who looks most persecuted.

Take the PPPC’s ongoing vendetta against AZMO. It has all the hallmarks of a classic mistake. The idea, presumably, was simple: hound the man until he shrinks, discredit him until he fades, and reduce his public standing to something resembling an expired library card. Instead, the result has been the political equivalent of trying to diet by staring angrily at cake. The harder you stare, the more you are tempted to take a piece of the cake.

The problem is that Guyanese people, for all our many quirks, share one deeply ingrained moral instinct. We do not like to see advantage taken of others. We don’t like a bully. We really don’t like a coordinated pile-on. And we absolutely hate seeing a man kicked when he’s already flat on his back, wondering what on earth just happened and whether the referee is legally blind.

With AZMO, what the public is witnessing does not feel like normal political rivalry. It feels systematic. Orchestrated. Almost rehearsed. Like a badly directed play in which the villain keeps re-entering the stage to boo the hero, only to discover the audience is now applauding louder out of spite.

The PPPC seems baffled by this. Each new act of nastiness is delivered with the confidence of someone convinced that the next punch will finally do the trick. Instead, it has the opposite effect. AZMO grows larger in the public imagination—more sympathetic, more relatable, more likeable—while the government’s image shrinks into something peevish and mean-spirited.

Consider the Budget speech. There was no earthly reason—no constitutional emergency, no cosmic alignment of the planets—why Parliament could not have been summoned earlier. And yet it wasn’t. The public, never shy of suspicion, connected the dots with the enthusiasm of a conspiracy theorist. The conclusion was obvious to many: Parliament would not be called into another sitting until AZMO was extradited.

Because to call a sitting would mean electing a Leader of the Opposition and this would mean electing AZMO. The PPPC was determined not to give him that moment of glory. This is what the public perceives and true or not, the perception stuck. And in politics, perception is reality’s louder, more obnoxious cousin.

The pussyfooting when it came to the constitutional duty to elect a Leader of the Opposition was so elaborate it could have qualified as a new Olympic sport. Only when the international community cleared its throat—politely, but with meaning—did the process suddenly find its legs.

Guyanese people noticed. They always do. We may forget the exact details, but we never forget the feeling that something wasn’t right.

Add to this the increasingly obvious weaponisation of state agencies. When bodies like the GRA begin to look less like neutral institutions and more like props in a political vendetta, the public’s sympathy meter starts spinning wildly. Nothing makes a man more popular than the impression that the full weight of the state is being leaned on him for reasons that feel political rather than principled.

The PPPC appears not to understand a basic rule of human psychology: persecution creates martyrs, not villains. Every new act against AZMO is interpreted not as proof of his unworthiness, but as evidence that he must be important enough to fear. And fear, when visible, is terribly unflattering.

So here we are, watching a government inadvertently manufacture its own antagonist. The more they hound AZMO, the greater he becomes in the public eye. The more they push, the more he is vilified, the larger he looms. It’s a masterclass in political self-sabotage by the PPPC. The more it hounds AZMO, the more people dislike the PPPC.

If the goal was to diminish AZMO, the strategy has failed spectacularly. What it has done instead is turn him into a symbol—of victimisation, of resistance, of unfairness. And symbols, once created, are notoriously difficult to get rid of. Just ask anyone who ever tried to argue with a Guyanese crowd that a bully was only “doing his job.”

In the end, the PPPC may discover too late that you cannot bully someone into political irrelevance. All you can do is convince the public that you are afraid of him. And fear, like neurosis, has a way of announcing itself loudly—usually right before the ridicule starts.

(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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• AZMO, Peeping Tom, Politics, PPPC

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