The PNCR and the fetish of blame

May 11, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News- There is something faintly pitiful, even grotesque, about the way the PNCR continues to speak of politics. The language is old, stiff, unbending. It is a language forged in the past and then embalmed in the rituals of opposition. The party says it does not condone violence, says it supports peace and constitutional order. But like so many things, words are one thing; reality is quite another.

On April 28th, 2025, the city of Georgetown was once again made hostage to chaos. There were flames. There was looting. There was the mad terror of crowds unmoored from any discipline or cause. And in the aftermath—like a well-practised actor stepping into an old role—the PNCR pointed its finger not at the vandals, not at the terror-makers, but at the People’s Progressive Party. It was the same script, barely edited for time. The PPPC, they claimed, was behind it all. The violence, they implied, was orchestrated, planted, infiltrated—just as they said in 1997.

That year too, when protests against the electoral outcome spiraled into public indecency and destruction, the PNCR denied responsibility. Women were stripped in the streets. Stores were ransacked. Buses were attacked. People were robbed and beaten. Buildings were set alight. And the explanation offered was the same: the protests were noble, but were infiltrated. Criminal elements. Agents of mischief. Hidden hands. By the PPPC.

This is the party’s favourite fairy tale. It is a tale that has passed through generations of PNCR leadership like a family heirloom: whenever things turn ugly, someone else is to blame. The party, apparently, is only ever a victim. Never a participant, never a perpetrator. And certainly, never responsible. The truth is that the PNCR has never really repudiated the politics of confrontation. It has merely learnt to speak about them in a more tempered voice.

The tragedy here is not the lie. Politics is full of lies. The PPPC lies too. The tragedy is the refusal to grow. In twenty-eight years, the PNCR has not developed a new vocabulary, a new political ethic, a new way of seeing power. It still views elections as a contest of betrayal. It still peddles the same anxieties about rigging and exclusion, about manipulation and plots. It still believes, it seems, that democracy is legitimate only when it wins.

To say that the PNCR does not condone violence is to make a claim of moral distance. But moral distance must be demonstrated, not merely declared. In the face of the April 28th mayhem, what the country needed was clarity. It needed the PNCR to say—not with hesitation, not with qualifiers—that those who looted and terrorised the city were criminals. That their acts were indefensible. That grievance is no passport for terror. But instead of moral clarity, we received murky blame. Instead of introspection, we received projection.

This is not new politics. This is the old, undressed in newer fabric. The PNCR remains wedded to the idea that it can continue with its finger-pointing and diversions but this is not only dishonest; it is dangerous. Because in a country as historically fragile as Guyana, to speak in innuendo while fire burns in the streets, supermarkets and stores are ransacked and people are beaten and robbed, is not merely cowardice—it is complicity.

The party cannot condemn the act without condemning the actors. It cannot stir resentment, feed narratives of stolen elections, and then plead innocence when the worst impulses of that resentment erupt in public. And it cannot hope to win the confidence of a nation when it treats every disturbance as someone else’s doing.

There is a deeper malaise at work here—a political narcissism born of years in the wilderness. A party that once ruled now only remembers how to accuse. A party that once shaped the state now lives in permanent suspicion of it. In this worldview, no violence is ever its own. No protester is ever unruly. The evil is always external, the disorder always induced.

But a party that cannot take ownership of its own politics, that cannot see the difference between protest and sabotage, between grievance and terror, cannot be trusted with the stewardship of a nation. The people of Guyana deserve a political opposition that is more than a ghost of 1997. They deserve something serious, something accountable. What they have instead is a party still clinging to the logic of blame, still afraid of the truth.

The violence of April 28th may have ended. But the deeper violence—the violence of evasion, of bad faith, of old lies dressed as new caution—continues. And until the PNCR can finally say, without theatre or deflection, “this was wrong, and we reject it,” it will remain not a government-in-waiting, but a relic of a long, unhealed past.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.) 

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