Contrary to the sentiments, including non conciliatory race -bating headlines like this in the State news organ,
the People’s National Congress -PNC’s- implosion was neither a slow rolling event nor as petty as this small minded
taunt, framed as analysis.
All the rancor, the interactive discord and the over all social media dysfunction by its multiple cross-continent factions, in continued mitosis- even now– underscore an absence of Leadership and at the central level.
But this was not the cause of the savaging the Party suffered at the 2025 September 1st General Election…receiving a shameful 77,998K with a paltry 17.79% of total votes in a show of undeniable rejection for the candidate who ran on the PNC’s ticket.
We, on this platform, tend to dabble in numbers and even if their records are few because of strategic systemic under-reporting, numbers never fail to tell a story.
Of note, before we proceed, is that implosion is not a substitute for the absence of efficient daily administration of a political entity, in and out, of election cycles.
Now.
The trail of blame ascribed seems to begin with Desmond Hoyte’s loss to Cheddi Jagan in 1992.
We factor in the smaller electorate of that cycle -(384 195 K) but note the comparatively massive voter turn out -to September 1st 2025- and the 42.31% that cast its votes for PNC, netting 31 seats, in spite of some loss, making it the Elected Opposition.
This, more than not, is evidence of a Candidate who was palatable to more than 40% of the combined voters.
It, also, reflects administrative investment in some measure of voter engagement and Party messaging, critical to influencing, motivating, informing and mobilizing all of the electorate and not just Party members.
The 1997 election recorded a shift in fortunes for the PNC. With a registered electorate of 461,481K voters, an increase of 80,286 from 1992, the PNC lost 5 seats with 40.5% of the votes and the PPP gained 2 -even with the electoral tumult surrounding Janet’s ascension to office, in spite of a court order barring her from doing so.
No tectonic shift in Parliamentary relevance here, since the PNC retained its standing as elected Opposition.
The loss, though, could be seen as a less robust effort in voter engagement and Party messaging by the PNC to highlight an economic agenda and other social areas to counter the effects of People’s Progressive Party politics of the day. Employment and specifically, female employment, was on the decline in 1997, while maternal mortality was on a steep climb. Those were definitely deployable weapons for any efficient campaign.
Thereafter, the PPP, by whatever means, remained in office for the next 23 years. The PNC, because of its electoral performance, sat in the role of elected Opposition for as many years, with opportunity for an extended internship on Party Operations.
This would have involved- Practice Evaluations, not the least of which is candidate selection that remains indelible in the PNC blue print of its Founders…assuming leaders were diligent in their duties, during this lengthy waiting period.
The blend of charisma, competence and capability was the not- so -secret sauce for success. Top that off with a candidacy process that preceded election with appropriate selection of a candidate, fit to ensure the efficient dispatch of the Party’s agenda and always a better performance at the polls.
That the Party has departed from this original charter is an understatement -and not for ideological re-alignment but in exchange for convenience at the expense of rigor. Purposefulness became another casualty, subverting mission to marquis members and personalities that consumed the Party’s image.
Founding principles were traded for the ease of cliquishness. And, the notion that loud voices with a throng of supporters was substitute for selection of a viable candidate, took hold.
What was subtracted from this modern math formula was that a candidate has to be capable of electoral fusion to provide an alternative for voters from the competing Parties, insufficiently comfortable with their Party’s pick for candidacy.
The brashness of a young Norton is always the introduction to conversations about his Party tenure.
But he was expelled from the PNC by one of its favored Presidents and Leaders – Desmond Hoyte- who believed that the Party’s mold was critical to its brand and was unapologetic about citing Norton’s violation of its code of conduct, which, per opinions, remains unchanged.
What’s always remarkable here, is how the PPP never misses an opportunity to cite the PNC’s goal of excellence as classism or elitism, as subtle encouragement for degrading behavior within its ranks, which they then weaponize against it.
Ravi Dev’s rush to Norton’s rescue is hardly magnanimous. It’s part of the bait and switch ploy used to pit the uninformed in the PNC against its foundation of education and social propriety, which the PPP sells as uppity, to the gullible.
After the death of Hoyte, Norton returned to the Party to what is recalled as a continuum of belligerence and bravado interrupted only by episodes of a tumultuous tenure.
PNC’s win in 2015 was reprieve from 23 years of PPP’s dominance. This directly challenges the claim of implosion since 1992 because, with that win, the overall Party trajectory reversed its downward course, irrespective of the political circumstances that brought opportunity.
Of the 412,012 votes cast and counted, PNC won 207, 200 and regained 7 of the seats it lost and dragged under from 1997.
It’s 2020 elections, even after court settlement, awarded PNC 31 seats with 217, 920, 47.34% of the votes to PPP’s 33 seats with 233,661 of the votes, and JLP snagging 1 seat.
So where’s the implosion, we ask?
These numbers in 2020 in no way reflect an implosion. It’s a loss by 1 seat, 15, 741 and 3.35% less votes than the winner ….which was what Norton took over when he ascended to the chair of Leader in 2021…an ascension we’ll revisit shortly.
And because it can be proven by linear accounting of the gazetted numbers, the claim of ‘Implosion’, as we’ve shown, is a manufactured state of affairs intended to excuse the walloping PNC was served at the ballot box on September 1st, 2025.
We’ve shown, by recorded numbers the implosion is actually failure which began at the PNC Administrative level and collapsed at the ballot box.
Any attempt to mask this mass of incompetence will continue to chip away at the electoral institution of the PNC that is the inheritance from its Founders to ensure suffrage rights for every Guyanese- not the least of whom are of African heritage.
The wisdom of its founders cannot be overstated when considering the stringent standards candidates, for every level, were expected to meet and surpass when fielded for positions.
By 2021, the practice to ensure those standards had been so routinely ignored that Norton’s ascension to Leadership came by self assignment and not election.
The doctrine days of what the Party stood for and its how’s and why’s were replaced by feuding factions and the ‘buzing’ battles that determined turf and title. A man, expelled by one of the Party’s most exemplary leaders, sat atop this, once, bastion of politics. Silence from those who knew better was their preferred posture.
And the coronation by manipulation of a person whose abilities lagged way behind the over-generosity of accolades endowed, completed the appearance of a popularly chosen candidate as being representative of what the Party represented.
We, like many others, knew and said better…warned unceasingly of this egregious error and its propensity to destroy an inheritance in the political Party that originated on giving us political opportunity in the land that we, our labor, built from scratch.
For this reason, if none else, we will continue to call for its preservation by reverting to its blue print on Leadership.
The Central Executive Committee – CEC- that hoisted the fallen Leader to the seat of control by charter of clique and not election, confirms that the rot at the head has permeated throughout the body and that the CEC’s viability, capacity to work for the good of the institution, is negative.
That they have unanimously ‘re-affirmed’ the leadership of the worst failure in the Party’s history, reads like a hostage concession.
It sounds like the amalgam of Cronyisim, Favoritism, Nepotism, Patronage, Partiality, and Bias, that becomes the operating system for those deliberately starved of truth in order to secure obeisance and blind faith…as in the declaration of complete confidence in a decisive loser.
A leader, acceded to the top by dubious means, is unlikely to admit his prior expulsion for institutional failures and his current level of national rejection as the proximate cause of the Party’s erosion.
In this, we submit that the CEC was constrained and confined to one weak and inferior candidate.
We find it hard to believe that a CEC, armed with better information on its duty to uphold the founding principles of the Party, as well as the Party’s frail grip on its continued existence, would unanimously vote for his return.
If any lesson was taught in this electoral dismantlement of the PNC, it was the prioritizing of wisdom. Being more wise than loyal is our individual responsibility to improve our communal lot.
It is our responsibility, therefore and always, to select not the popular, or those handed to us through a system that has abandoned inherited guidelines but to select the best amongst us because they will be the pilots of our collective destiny.
All those who know better and prefer to rest in the convenience of it being settled by the current membership, knowing the Political Party is just a shell of itself, may try to ignore its decay.
It takes a lot to kill a political bastion like the PNC that has a foot print in historic documents of the UK Hansard.
But changing its brand by ignoring its decomposition, cowering to a political pirate and abandoning its hard- fought -for -history because of a Party Constitution that reads like a circular firing squad, is like hiring the hit-man and providing the weapon.
Leveraging the intent of the Party Constitution to publicize its hijacking, is as lethal a weapon as the subversion of the rules that gave the fallen leader an unchallenged path to nomination, NOT ELECTION.
Standing against what your political party has degenerated to is as noble as fighting for it.
And if there was ever a need to fight, it has to be now when the rejection of this leader has national subscription and greater potential to have the Party erased as any level of contender…given the defections of many of its constituents to the tents of its rivals.