….the builder the stones now refuse….
By Kojo M Parris
Political machinery exists to win continuously, and that is the primary metric of a political party. So the question worth putting to our main parties is about their readiness for the challenges coming at them, and what shape, policies and leadership will deliver them robust outcomes.
That is not a private question for any of our political parties, and least of all for the PPP, though it might suit them all to claim so. Whether your neighbour keeps to the fire code is not solely her business. Because when her building, the largest on the street, goes up in flames, the threat does not stop at your shared fence. Your fortunes, and those you love are directly impacted.
The PPP is the largest political structure in the country and stands next to all of our institutions, so every citizen shares a fence with the party Cheddi built. So every Guyanese, including the many who have never held a party card, has a stake in how its internal disciplines are transacted, and in the conduct of those wielding influence.
Other parties show how much turns on it. Margaret Thatcher won every election she fought, yet by 1990 the engine of her support had become the reason her party could not win another. Her gracious resignation extended Conservative hegemony seven years more. After too long in power under the same, dominant leader, UNIP had no existence apart from the legendary Kenneth Kaunda’s. So, fed up with his determination to stay in charge, Zambians removed the party with him still clinging to the
levers of power In 1991, no longer distinguishing the man from the Party. In a normally functioning political party, the engine and the machine are not the same thing, and conflating them is the oldest and most fatal error in politics.
The literature and the observed practice suggest four aspects any party should probe in the person at its centre.
First, where an electorate can remove a leader, the voters hold something that leader needs, and that imposes its own discipline on him. Where a leader rests instead on the party office he holds, nobody exercises any discipline, because the occupant of that office decides who may discipline him.
Second, an official obligated to those the status quo has enriched – by design or by their own efforts – cannot refuse even their mildest demands, particularly where they have grown accustomed to yes.
Third, every party carries hostility it can do nothing about, arising from its history and the demographics of its membership. But sometimes the key official has himself become the best argument the opposition has, and no party need carry a handicap it could set down whenever it chose.
Fourth, the thing that has to come down should be taken down by someone who did not build it, avoiding the prevarication of nostalgia. This is the hardest of the four, and the least personal. An architect does not readily demolish his own building, especially one built through circumstances of great adversity when other architects would have given up, and it is unreasonable to ask it of him.
Any standard is only honest if it applies to everyone, and the voter should reward whichever party endorses a leadership its members can discipline. WIN fails the first two tests before its programme is weighed, and APNU still carries the ethnic anxieties history bequeathed it. APNU, well, APNU….
For most of its history the PPP’s machinery relentlessly manufactured consent, and since 1992 in nominally increasing amounts. Under Cheddi Jagan, and early in Bharrat Jagdeo’s presidency, the party brought Indo-Guyanese back into the mainstream, spotlighting the Amerindian population alongside them. This work was not trivial. Jagdeo finished what Hoyte had begun, carrying a country immobilised by debt through relief and fiscal stabilisation. And the Low Carbon Development Strategy and the Norway forest agreement turned our standing forests into an annuity, a decade ahead of the global trend.
Alas, something has since inverted. Because the most blatant abuse of that decades-long accretion of goodwill is that very machine now converts party capital into personal wealth, for a few, it manufactures discontent where consent gushed. The machinery still runs, if anything with greater efficiency, but what it produces is a brooding grievance among the vast majority of party and ordinary citizens.
The party’s own records codify the change. The 2024 Congress struck Marxism-Leninism and socialism from the constitution and put nothing in their place. What had taken opulent residence simply expanded to fill the ideological vacancy, a vulgar materialism, though not in the Marxian tradition. But it is what that Congress kept that is more revealing – Democratic Centralism. Since the party has no separate rule for choosing a leader, Democratic Centralism is the rule. In this modus, a few recommend, a modestly larger room decides, and the cadres follow. Ralph Ramkarran, who chaired many of those post 1992 meetings has written that these are the only rules the party has, and argued for their renewal.
But some of us had been forewarned. In 2009, invited to serve as running mate to a prospective PPP presidential candidate, I sought the counsel of a now late senior official of the party. In their legendary laconic yet loquacious cadence, it was intoned, with a wistful inflection:
“Parris, this is no longer the party of Jagan. This is now a vehicle for crass accumulation and conspicuous consumption.”
But watch the rules work. In 1997 there was no ballot, and there never has been one for this purpose; within a week of Janet Jagan’s candidacy the Executive Committee produced the Jagdeo and Hinds ticket. The two had contested nothing and defeated nobody. In 2011 a senior member appealed publicly for a secret ballot and was opposed, so that by the time the Central Committee met there was nothing left to vote on. All internal dissent, of which there was more than a murmur, was squashed.
The party has never once chosen its presidential candidate by a free and transparent plebiscite of its members, the very thing for which scores of its activists suffered jail, harassment and the disruption of their careers before 1992. The irony is thick, and contradiction runs deep.
Nor is the structure it operates of its own making, which makes its survival the more striking, and the grievance-manufacturing increasingly attaching to their very own. At independence the country’s decisions were made in Parliament. By way of the Declaration of Sophia decision-making migrated into Cabinet, and then to the Office of the President after Shahabuddeen’s 1980 constitution. The PPP spent those years opposing party paramountcy, and has since governed for three decades
without dismantling an iota of it. Indeed, the decision-making has simply consolidated one step further – to a table for five or six at the Hard Rock Cafe on karaoke Tuesdays.
That table decides, and the party’s faithful faithfully pay the bill. Consider the anomaly in that. The most powerful public figure in Guyana has not stood before the electorate as a candidate for the
country’s leadership since 2006. He holds a seat in the National Assembly, but an extracted one drawn from the party’s list, and a list seat answers to whoever controls the list. He does.
In a recent 592 Guardian piece, Hem Kumar puts the strongest objection to this Jagdeo-centric frame that requires a response. The government is a partnership, so the President and Vice-President should be judged together. He goes onto assert that the deeper question is systemic, namely, whether a citizen can obtain fair treatment from the State without being connected enough to catch the attention of someone powerful (for example at the increasingly frequent Ministerial Outreaches).
He should be right on both counts. But assessing in tandem implies an equal ability to decide the course of the ship of State, and a comparable capacity to impose remedies across the structures.
President Ali holds a mandate the electorate can take back should it choose. No such remedy exists for his Vice-President’s steadily accumulating mandate.
All this time the bills keep arriving, from an inexorably rising cost of living, the unreservedly brash displays of wealth that would not survive an auditors’ pencil, among the most unfeeling. And in the
only currency that matters to a political party, faltering votes. Let us first concede that the aggregate figures do not show a party in obvious trouble since the nominal vote rose in 2025, and so did the share. But the register grew by some ninety-six thousand verified entries while roughly 18000 fewer votes were cast, and turnout fell by close to twelve points. In Regions 3 and 6 a party 90 days old not only out-polled APNU, but moved decisively into the PPP’s slipstream, exactly where any challenger wants to be while the front-runner combats rising headwinds.
That is not yet a base in revolt. It is a base going quiet, contemplating, even seething, which every therapist knows precedes a contentious break-up. That those same voters knowingly sent a man under United States sanctions and facing extradition to the Leader of the Opposition’s chair is less an endorsement of him than a message from the PPP’s base of smouldering frustration, and an unwillingness to go on paying the bill got Karaoke Tuesday.
Which returns us to the third requirement. Some of the hostility the PPP attracts is structural, arising from the ethnic arithmetic and fifty years of political bloodletting. No leader will dissolve it, and it is the fixed cost of being the PPP. But increasingly, a growing share coagulates one man, to the all-knowing manner at public podiums, to contempt for the questioner rather than the question at press conferences, and to the distance between what is preached at rallies and what is plainly visible in the obese residences of the lucky few. Hostility of that kind is portable, and leaves when the flag bearer fades into a more graceful, Mandelian pose. The party need not decide whether any of it is deserved, since a ballot makes no distinction between fair and unfair antipathy. The only question is what it costs; and whether the party must keep paying even as the lights flicker, presaging yet another GPL sanity test.
But set the personal aside and ask what WIN offers. It has no programme to speak of and no record to scrutinise. What it offers is a container, somewhere a rural Indian voter can put her exasperation without crossing into the PNC, the one thing she still will not do. WIN found the discontent lying about, unclaimed by APNU. Moving one man out of the spotlight would empty that container more effectively than any Ministerial Outreach, cash grant or concessional fund the government could announce. And what luck – the opposition’s most effective recruiter oversees the government benches!
This is a cold, transactional calculation rather than a moral judgement, and one that parties intent on renewal must make, WIN or no WIN. Almost nothing in the PPP’s position is within its own gift, not the cost of living, the ethnic arithmetic, or the steady drift of nurses to Barbados. Exactly one item on the balance sheet is voluntary, and that is who stands at its centre, attempting to summon an increasingly sceptical countryside into a ceaseless struggle remote from its own. The fear inside Freedom House is that the machine cannot run without that engine. But the machine’s currency is patronage, and patronage does not recognise a face.
There is a second drift, and it does not stop at the party’s edge. The cost of living has made ordinary life harder each year, and discriminates by neither political allegiance, race nor religion. And every day Guyanese respond by wearily constructing new lives in the US embassy visa queue.
And yet a change of face is not, by itself, a change of course. Julius Nyerere stepped down in 1985 with nothing threatening his position, kept the chairmanship of Chama Cha Mapinduzi five more years, precisely where Jagdeo sits today, and then surrendered that too. Judgement matters. CCM still governs Tanzania, but it revived its appeal by replacing the leader without revising the politics, which is why changing the man is necessary, rather than sufficient.And who pays for this inaction is worth being precise about. The Karioke’s five or six never do. The loss falls on the Corentyne member who has voted for this party all her adult life and has nothing to show for the oil but a growing supermarket bill; on the branch activist who loyally turns voters out, unpaid, and must answer on Lusignan doorsteps for the hulking Providence mansions; and senior figures in Parliament defending decisions they had no part in taking.
Who acts is a different question from who suffers, and the answer is never at the very top. The men at the summit have most to lose from disturbing the structure, so change comes from the rank below, from those carrying the responsibility without the rewards. The pattern is familiar across the world, where it has seldom been the generals who moved but the colonels, and seldom without the quiet support of established money that values stability over newly won access. The regional chairmen and district organisers, whose standing depends on the party existing in twenty years’ time; and the old PPP money, made before the oil and not dependent on a signature obtained in a darkened Prado, are the people whose interest lies in renewal.
Measured against the four requirements, the present arrangement satisfies none of them. The authority at the party’s centre cannot be withdrawn by any electorate. The people who would have to
act are those empowered and enriched by it. The hostility it attracts is the opposition’s most reliable recruiter. And the structure that has to come down is the work of the man who would himself have to take it down. The first three conditions anyone could remedy. The fourth cannot be remedied at all, which is why it matters most. Kumar argues that the measure of the party’s success should be the contextual maintenance of Cheddi Jagan’s inheritance, rather than concern for anybody’s reputation or face. On that measure the arithmetic comes out the same.
Gratitude and interest are not the same thing. Jagdeo’s absence would not be a concession to the party’s opponents. It would be the lifting of an increasingly intolerable weight the party has been made to carry, unrecompensed, and the first step of a renewal only the party itself can choose.
For those of us living the Guybai dystopia, we experience a country humming with concrete developments yet unable to evidence widespread human development. Human progress is deferred, and the country asked to accept fool’s gold in its place.
All the while, the house the Jagans built is being dismantled, and WIN is carrying off the stones while the PNC searches for expired title deeds, all because the builder insists on staying.
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