…Nor do these picks reflect any fixed set of ideas that the Peoples National Congress (PNC) – now located at the fence line of the Parliamentary sittings – seek to champion, in order to reinvigorate the Party that was hand-picked to receive the scrolls of Independence because of its ethos of leader-quality and its mission to assure every citizen their right to their nation’s patrimony.
The Party’s Constitution has failed.
A cumulation of decades of inserts and work -arounds that satisfied immediate needs, and not the long-term preservation of founding principles, were quick fixes for shallow solutions.
The ultimate outcome is a current system that holds itself hostage to a circle of rules that short-circuits itself.
Indeed, we have only the luxury of a grossly outdated Party Constitution to use as cross reference and testament to failures along the way….and buttressed this with readings from the Founder’s Declaration of Sophia on the Party and its purpose.
But even as a relic of itself, and in its aged form, it makes the case for the current demise – a testament to the foresight of the founders, whose construction of this perennial guide was grounded in education and reputable social standing because it was a vehicle to lead – and by example.
We’ll confess our unmitigated bias to academia and the quality it brings to situations where this expertise is relevant – especially when the matriculation is from a respected institution and not the Diploma Mills that sell the 21 degrees so many others boast of.
Yet, this alone doth not a politician make.
And, an evaluation of the journey of this once storied Party, now in the throes of cataclysm, forces us to wonder why there is not more clamoring, more citizen intervention into what seems like an unstudied selection of candidates that meets only the standards of a selector, whose most memorable success is his unmatched failure as the helm of the PNC.
Raw politics would query what is the rationale behind the PNC Leader’s selection of his Parliamentary Head, whose political resume reads like a Party Tourist Visa.
We support ideological exploration but at this time, how do we conclude that a person who said the PPP courted him for their 2025 PM candidate, who was a member of A New United Guyana, irrespective of how brief, can lead the PNC in Parliament to resurrection when there is no- at least recent/current– traceable residence of his to PNC, its doctrine or its convictions?
Mr. Campbell has said his ride on the PNC train would be to serve Guyana – which is at odds with the fact that a List Member serves the Party primarily and the Country tangentially. Charandass all but made the same claim with the bloody knife in his hand.
We’re not, in any way, forecasting. Were just reflecting and wondering at the breadth of the List Picker’s due diligence.
We note, too, the selection of a known academic, a seasoned activist with more than three decades of political experience.
But how does this move the PNC along and especially when there was such a public break between this activist and the PNC…even if the current umbrella is Partnership?
Will this be framed as the fault of a Constitution that remains bound between covers with the date 1994 because it is more convenient to blame this stale-dated document?
Or should the Constitution’s intended power be leveraged, its founding principles of being the driver of Party ideology through an IDEAL FIELD of carefully pruned selectees, be implemented at this moment of Party implosion?
Even in its outdated form, there is a case to be made to salvage the Constitution’s intent… that of Leadership of Excellence.
And, with this, there is opportunity for preemptive guardrails to protect member/supporter trust and Party viability, going forward.
Part of this would activate the Framers pledge for perennial diligence.
Most of all, leveraging intent would remove the comedic appearance of having the Party’s most prolific loser pick its winners to take it in to the future….starting with 2025 and the 13th Parliament.
Neither method nor madness, there’s due concern about his other picks.
We’re unsure of his selection of a former MP who famously sang ‘ Born in the Land of the Mighty Roraima’ as a precursor to her contribution at a budget debate -which was neither budget nor debate. It was a listing of petty grievances which offered neither solution nor remedy.
But it was chock- full of entertainment for those who applaud abrasive comebacks as politicking because they’ve never been schooled on the role of the politician in their receipt of financial benefits, to which they are entitled.
“The line-up blends experience, activism, and professional expertise”… boasts the disgraced ‘Leader’ but how does that salvage this historic Party of national relevance from the brink of extinction? Experience in what, we’re asking?
If it’s a reference to membership, then we know that using a failed entity as a job reference is grounds for not getting the job.
Even from the paling of Parliament, the Party, with its truncated presence, has to be strong enough to capably, and
not remonstratively, respond to pressing national issues with contributions that reflect a stated position based upon tenets of a Constitution and political umbrella.
So, recognizing that the Party’s Constitution has failed is not to submit that all is lost.
It is say that every effort must be made to preserve its existence and it’s intended purpose.
And this is even more pressing now, when the Party is in catastrophic crisis and a voluntary vacation from the seat because of proven incompetence by its failed Leader, is not an expectation.
He was elected to lead, is the talk, but our response is that he was not elected to lead us to indisputable failure.
We’re also submitting that the system that was inherited from the Framers came with built in ‘Norton- Proofing’ – where a battery of select people were tasked with determining the eligibility of those vying for higher and upper office before they became eligible for candidacy …a system that may not have survived the untimely passing of the Founder.
No system can guarantee its survival but when its Constitution fails, the insurers of its destiny can.
And the insurers are those of us who will continue to vote and support this Party-a political inheritance crafted for us by its founding members -who, tested, adjusted and corrected it along the way, in deference to its pledge to rigor.
Bridge building is paramount. Deconfliction is a goal. And all this requires bringing the right people into the room to discuss a well crafted agenda that follows the blue print.
But this is inconceivable with the current PNC Leadership. Mr. Norton has lost acres of political ground in this 2025 election cycle. A big problem for him is that his charisma does not extend beyond the PNC which puts his party at a structural disadvantage.
He’s currently riding the wave of cultish support by those who claim his beat-down was a plot. What this misunderstands is that he’ll be a laughing stock in Parliament, a target by his age old nemesis and the new comer, looking to etch his notch into the Parliament totem pole.
The Party’s relegation to on-looker in Parliament will come with the disrespect meted out to a back- bencher and the futility of a heckler screaming from the bleachers.
Questions from his own Party will remain- why was he so ill-prepared to combat the ‘rigging’ that they project every election cycle and why the numbers in anticipated strongholds were so weak?
The response of’ ‘massive vote buying’ would be seen as PNC’s failure to prepare the voter against that, amongst the cascade of failures that confirm the leader’s lack of the overall skillset to have ever held the position of Party Leader as designed by the Framers, who grounded the Party’s construct on education, built in and around social ease -which is Norton’s political kryptonite.
“Only 50% of the voters voted”…is the PNC cult excuse. Then that proves how undesirable Norton is to voters. The Majority of the voting 50% voted against him. And the implication that the 50% who stayed home and would have voted for him questions why he was so incapable of turning out, even, his own base?
It’s a comedic excursion of blame shifting, scapegoating, bad-news burying and clumsy message spinning that confirms incompetence as an operating system for Norton’s PNC.
And for all of the foregoing, it does appear, unsurprisingly, that his decision to stay out of Parliament is more in service to his failure than Party Ideology.
Deputizing a replacement may spare him the embarrassment during the mouth to mouth combat he has championed. But it may weaken the PNC’s enfeebled position if close encounters will be fought by PNC Appointees and not Stalwarts.
And it’s not to say he will be out of Parliament working to improve PNC’s standing.
He can’t.
He is a mangled political figure whose demonstrable lack of leadership, judgment and political savvy, calls for his resignation.
The institution of the People’s National Congress is the bigger entity here.
And if decency doesn’t prevail, we’re confident that a combination of continued public outrage, media exposure and internal Party pressure from the remnant of the founding doctrine, will.