Pledging to do the bare minimum like “ensuring public resources must serve the people not ministers, political favourites or a privileged elite”, is hardly an effort.
It’s as reflexive as coughing when you choke… and shows no innovation in preventing choking, just assembling the watch words of provocation to mark yourself present.
Twelve months after accepting a thin assembly of political parties under its umbrella, then being wiped out at the polls, APNU remains lodged between political stasis and a leadership deficiency.
Norton, the pilot to predicament, has charted a course between Hijack and Decimation. It reads a like a dark plot line that evokes images of domination and doom–because it is.
Forget Captain Evil, who compares as an amateur. Norton has found the plunger and the breach point.
And, as a political predator, his fait accompli is to sit atop the organization from which he was barred by men, who, in their infinite wisdom, detected his political deformities. Never-the-less- he’s going to sit there, if just to boast of being there- route and Party be damned.
APNU, under his piracy, brags of acquisitions of Parties that only have a leader but no proof of registered constituents engaged in the business of politics and its activities.
We’ve been trying to find more than nominal existence of ‘ A Movement for Improvement’ headed by a Shiek Yassin since it ‘joined’ APNU on June 26th 2025. Kingdom Liberation Movement and Legalize Cannabis are also Parties that ‘joined’ APNU on that very date.
Norton’s addition of these Parties, whose platforms we’re still unsure of– let alone if they align with APNU– is the kind of strategic incoherence he doesn’t surprise us by.
If he would have only explained how he planned to remove the cannabis laws and to make the Christian and Muslim combination accepting of the parts of society they have a right to reject, it may have been a strategy.
Then he could have explained how all of that tied in to his generic slogan ‘Putting People First’ – if subsets of his platform put ideology first.
There’s no policy dissonance with the other Parties under his canopy. But these last three hang off like a sixth toe. The secular progressivism– cannabis – and the religious conservatism scream internal disjointedness, if not rejection.
In a simple organization each department is a road to the mission. Not so, here…under Norton’s divergent APNU. And this exposes the combination of guile and deceit he employs as an operating system to camouflage what he lacks in knowledge.
We’ve already cited him exerting the paycheck because he picks who gets to be in Parliament, a paying job. What we’ve not gone in to is the glamour and the lime light, the psychological currency that may just be another paycheck for those, duly qualified, who reduce themselves to playing parts in his circus.
There was subterfuge in his extended delay of his inaugural meeting to three three years post his inauguration date.
He would have had to set up the Party’s operating framework and make ‘Leader’ more than a tag to clip on to his front pocket. He would have had to be part of an extensive contextualized Party analysis and come up with a methodology to make it attractive and effective in Guyana’s environment. In other words, he would have had to demonstrate a talent beyond claiming that he has talent.
So, at the last minute, he corralled three groups that he designated political parties. He made a grand announcement as if he had engaged in Party expansion. Then he marketed his prowess with copious posts on his preferred platform, Face Book, where tribal defenses elevate him beyond self worth.
‘Joined’, as the announcement says, reads like a hollow show of artificial strength by a ‘strategist’ who is as genuine as his solutions.
Look. It was election eve. He could have streaked. So let’s be grateful.
Moving along.
The deferred Inaugural took us back to when his predecessors had the honor of leadership and the plans they laid out.
We remember Desmond Hoyte’s ‘The Task Ahead’ delivered December 15th 1985 and Corbin’s ‘ One Guyana’ –more fittingly adopted than its current application. These were all road maps by Party leaders to affirm a plan, define direction and establish methods.
They backed their political vision openly and extensively, by comparison to the Norton era, with structured administrative and constitutional architecture. It’s the difference between their managerial competence and Norton’s subcontracting to any one, in order to feign organizational knowledge and managerial expertise.
The mashup of fliers and statements produced in furious volume for consumption by his Social Media cheerleaders, screams of internal disorder and an ‘all hands on deck’ attempt to make it look right.
But all hands on deck guarantees only labor never knowledge. No suripse, says the general public.
His record affirms that he’s always reactive, never methodological. His thoughts are never original not even the Machiavellian ones. There’s this thing about an empty suit…
The adoption of some fledgling entities that could hardly stand alone reeks of how willing he is to connive in the interest of self preservation.
It was Norton’s Party Logo, though, that placed the button on his suit.
To be fair, a logo change doesn’t have to be remarkably different. It depends on the strategy which ranges from progression to disruption. And when either of those points is absent from the chart, then, it’s referred to as cosmetic irrelevance.
The previous Logo, per records, was fashioned by APNU for 2011 elections. The current Logo was designed by APNU for 2025 elections.
The challenge is not only to distinguish the difference but to determine if it fits the characteristic of being distinguishable enough to bear its associated message…’Putting People First’.
Did the changes arrest attention…easily visible? Are they materially significant in their presentation or was this just another vanity project that massaged its proponents but gratified no one else?
We can gauge the gratification quotient from the 2025 election results but the point is to focus on the absence of expertise at the levels that are necessary for success.
Just sticking a few symbols in to represent new membership acquisition is the diluted version of any measure of quality. Not consulting a leadership committee affirmed the earlier loop-hole ascension to leadership by piracy.
It was executive fiat.
We have never supported unilateral changes to the framework of this historic Party. It is too much of an inheritance to be violated by the unchecked whims of temporary leadership.
And this time, it’s not even to build ” a big Benab“. This, 2025 symbol, was simply another demonstration of how bare minimum is Norton’s default setting.
Logos are distinguishable brand markings that are memorable identifiers and pictorial messengers for what is being branded. Its primary purpose is to stand out and in politics, be an emblem of pride for what you believe in and what you could steer others to.
This 2025 rendition is so thin veneer that it could have easily been a page from a child’s coloring book.
Cunning leaders can win elections. This one is even unfit but is effective at staying there–which makes him a triple threat to the Party and its existence.
Cunning is never to be confused or conflated with expertise.
Cunning is survival by outfoxing. Expertise is built on a course of reputable study and honest practice which ends with certification in the field.
And, placing members of his Central Executive into Parliament is not a show of organizational expertise or mastery–not when the inaugural meeting was held three years later. This is more like posting a surety bond, an act of cunning.
Norton arrived as a remedy to two ailments – the drought of candidacy and the absence of a succession backbench.
Dispensing generous doses of Norton -Tonic was intended to sooth the discomfort. Promoting his comparative youth as the elixir to the predicament soon proved that you couldn’t promote it without his baggage.
And, that has its own storefront.
He is emboldened by the perplexity of those who know better and encouraged by their decency to keep their thoughts out of the public… in the interest of Party Image. He is inflated by those who are academically qualified but cower to his self-designation of Political Scientist.
Commanding unearned authority with a reputation that is artificially propped up by actual experts is not a selling point for APNU let alone PNCR.
The historic Party can still be revived but looking to its assassin to do so is just as bad as allowing him to seize the reins, in the first place.
There are members who still know the institutional structure and how to elaborate its strengths and service goals. Communication methods may have evolved. But there are some who still know the founding– original– pillars of the Party and how to sell them. They still know how to establish a chain and get to the core of their constituency.
And its not going to the same nearby neighborhoods, asking the same insipid questions with cameras in tow and seeking validation on social media through clicks and cheering emojis. These are year-round activities, not like the three-month before elections addition of three straggling entities that made the Party a punch line.
That can never be erased; not even when the PPP refers to it in political pejoratives or its Leader besmirches it for political gain.
If there is any PNC member or believer in its founding still on the ground, they should heed this call.
Sometimes success does not flow from its traditional routes or move along its established courses.
It flows from uncommon optimism, superlative ambition and a destination not short of triumph.
Hopefully the baton will be wrested from the ‘Leader’ and the marathon will begin.
We know it will be grueling. But we hear the voices of those with a lean and hungry look.
