Typically, an advising strategist would have shared a cogent assembly of buzz words, just so that the Budget interview wouldn’t have been a mockery of expertise.
That’s how we know this public press conference had to be unsolicited, again…given the range of rambling and the final destination to, exactly, Nowhere.
Once past the terse and accusatory delivery which is standard camouflage for the absence of substance, the dam holding back the incompetence relieves itself of the combination of made up scenarios and matching facts, to bolster a pretend persona with a paired portfolio.
There are a couple of things we learned a while ago, apart from the “nothing new under the sun” aphorism.
A Financial Budget is a tool used, universally, across Personal Finance, Corporate Management and Government, to plan and control spending. The general concept is neither original nor unique. It is a foundational practice in Accounting and Finance that dates back millennia, even referenced in Biblical times.
Norton’s assertion, as quoted by Kaieteur News, that “financial” elements of APNU’s Manifesto are being poached by a political opponent might be speaking of a mindset – one comforted by self-glorification, if not predisposition to the suggested crime.
If you knew anything about anything involving statements made by Norton, you’d know to listen for the forked paths and tangents that detour to confuse your mental GPS. There is always the misplaced diction and overdone enunciation, with word-strings tagging along as fillers for thoughts left in suspension.
And that seems to be the demise of the Party, too, as it seesaws between extinction and resurrection, with a paralysis from the personnel we are thinking should be insisting on his resignation or his ‘request’ for extended leave.
Instructions should have been delivered to him with caveat. The same system that was porous enough for him to hijack the Party is equally as potent for calls to be made in the Public Square, for him to demit immediately, to announce that he has no popular authority to represent the People’s National Congress, after he led it to its historic flogging.
Congress is the Party’s main governing body which holds a Biennial Meeting that, post the 2025 election wipe out, assembles in August 2026. Norton, however, is a metastasizing condition which demands administrative resolutions that are prompt and conclusive.
To suggest the deciding body has to wait on a future time under-represents its establishing purpose, its inherent nimbleness to respond to crises, like the catastrophe that dislodged the Party from de facto Opposition, when not leading Government.
Pre-Emption is a messaging weapon. Call a media conference. Norton is the subject. He’s a news maker for all the wrong reasons. They’ll come.
Learned a long time ago, too, that Proactive Administration is taking initiative. People, not bureaucracy, direct the course of the organization’s actions, especially in cataclysm.
By the very set up of Congress – meeting only every two years – there’s an inference that crisis management would be the responsibility of the Party Leader. When the crisis is the Party Leader, then, the honor that is ascribed is forfeited.
The forfeiture is compounded when the Leader refuses to acknowledge the structural damage of his candidacy to the Party. The honor is aggravated when he places his ambition ahead of the entity his candidacy destroyed.
Another thing we learned a long time ago was “an evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over its ashes”.
We respect the role of PNC Congress and its position as Directing Overseer. There is, however, always an Overseer for the Overseer whose instructions, at a bare minimum, would be to lie low.
But Norton’s is a hostile takeover. We affirm this by his very standard of refusing to resign after losing 10 PNC seats when his Party benchmark for Hoyte was 5…plus his failure to bring along an AFC Coalition which lost a prospective 9, per the previous allocation.
And repeating this is never repetitive. It is instructive. It is essential context to establish why Norton’s very presence at the helm of the Party is both an aberration and institutional dysfunction – flagrant failure to be able to remove its cancer outside of normal order – ‘institution running the people’ would be the conclusion.
Maybe we should still be applauding the members who resigned, not to reap the largess of luring competitors but to highlight his inadequacies for office, his incapability to oversee the complex of the Political Entity.
His previous five years demonstrated severe failures in overall management. Fund raising methods – which he reduced to his personal appearance and collection of the funds- dubbed all expense paid full-service money haul, is a top concern.
Fundamental data management of prospective voters – not to mention the ability to woo crossover electors- were clearly not his forte.
If your people are so marginally invested in your Party’s ideology that, according to you, they were lured by those who ‘bought’ their votes, then per your own whining, your messaging failed.
Voting is intended to be ideological not transactional. Messaging has to transform voting from a transactional to an ideological choice.
The key to that is knowledge, not bluster. If you knew your voters, were realistic about their socioeconomic woes, then you would have prepared for, reinforced your message against, susceptibility to economic incentives as a congruent to ideological alignment.
Not to mention, you’ve used this wolf, to cry wolf, for every failure of the Party, since Desmond Hoyte demitted.
And, it’s not Granger’s fault. He turned over the Party in regular order, defined as either at the helm or as defacto Opposition, with 33 Coalition Seats intact.
What cannot be excluded from any assessment of the Party’s current demise is the personal and activist politics supplanted over PNC ideology, after Norton took office.
Mental rigidity, cognitive inflexibility, allergy to nuance and flaunting bias, all leadership handicaps, were encapsulated in this stinging statement ending with Oppressors.
The unmitigated confidence of the comment from the official elected as the people’s negotiator, affirmed his Parliamentary route was his favorite shortcut – the Low Road. Here, tolls are any form of disruption to avoid showing a lack of actual knowledge, which foretold both the scope of his inabilities and the magnitude of his impending failure.
Because of Norton, the PNC is currently in virgin territory, having been severely wounded by an intruder with keys to let himself in. He has brought the Party to ruin, having inflicted significant long-term damage on its reputation and electoral standing.
Yet, he’s still there, projecting a prowess his Parliamentary ranking classifies as weak, bordering on insignificant.
But he’s battening down like a street level bad-man, more protective of a pit bull persona than the people who cast a vote for him, perceiving him to be decent, normal and fighting for their political comfort.
Role-playing Political Thug, at least gets him attention from the news. But he’s more impressed that he’s holding the upper echelon in the Party hostage, that prestigious upper crust that he would have never been mistaken for…even after he engineered himself leader.
Most of us, more crushed than surprised, have watched him earn his demerits, show asymmetry with the standards, at both membership and leadership levels that were inherited from the Founders who molded the PNC.
The political legacy was crafted to be an enduring guidepost with a blueprint that established prerequisites, not excluding academia, social decency and dedication to the longevity of the institution.
It would be redundant to say that Norton was antithetical to this doctrine because his record, including expulsion, affirms it.
We are saying all this, boldly and loudly because we feel it should be the clarion call from all of the turrets. It should be broadcast via every medium to re-assure those committed to the Party’s purpose and foundation that we will not disappoint.
And, by extension, we will not disrespect those who, painstakingly, brainstormed and developed a political institution that the British, our colonial masters, selected to receive the scrolls of Independence, in 1966.
No Party Leader has approached the job like Norton has. No leader, we can find, has boasted of driving fear
instead of soliciting discourse.
No PNC Leader has ever ‘POPED’ a CARICOM meeting to advise its Leader of the ‘situation‘ in Guyana and was rejected – to Guyana’s eternal embarrassment.
And all this demands an answer to why there is not an ongoing clamor of PNC voices in the media- sphere, denouncing this continued defacement of the Party by its hijacker, failed leader and dedicated Party vandal.
Another thing we learned, a while ago, was a quote from Winston Churchill, who encouraged his fellow Parliamentarians to leave the past to history since he proposed to write that history himself. By then he was a prominent politician known as an avid user of intelligence data, whose approach to politics and public discourse was reputed to be grounded in factual information and evidence.
The take away was to emphasize his Party’s reporting integrity and to demonstrate how facts build reputation – (2nd para above column 558 in right margin).
The People’s National Congress has no such fortune, as it trundles through the bureaucratic rut that has aided in its take over by Norton, for no other reason than because he could.
Party housekeeping had long been neglected with its outdated policies and defunct operational rules, for starters. The Party was built for the 20th century and never caught up with the 21st and the information revolution of Social Media that gave everyone, with access, an opportunity to create their own narrative and spawn their own cliques, challenging, sometimes, veracity and reliability and pitting loyalty against common sense.
We’re not going guess on the condition of oversight that was formerly mandatory. But gauging from the ease of the hijacking, it had devolved to the bare minimum of discretionary, if it still existed at all.
In spite of the assault on its founding pillars of Ethos- character, credibility, Leadership – vision, direction, Strategy- execution, the Party, though not well, is alive, in our opinion because of its name, Peoples National Congress and branding letters PNC; a reflection on the immortality of its founders.
We’ll never subscribe to the lighthearted suggestions of its Administration being caught in flux. Even without experience, common sense would dictate that this level of vulnerability is the product of progressive erosion caused by practiced neglect.
That it’s on a timer is a warning. That it’s fixable is a blessing.
Like every organization, we are confident that there is a trusted pipeline, a system of influence with a variety of options at its disposal, to beat the last tick on the timer.
Norton loses and then refuses to leave, even though that was his remedy for Desmond Hoyte.
Public stoning, albeit figurative, remains a very potent option. The stakes are too high to allow his squatting in place because he is convinced decency and civility are no match for political thuggery.
Like so many things we learned a long time ago, we will invoke the Biblical parable of Goliath the Bully and David the Defender, with his five smooth stones.
It was Goliath who fell in that encounter, affirming that even the unassailable has a soft forehead when facing a well slung stone.