The moment of truth for the AFC

Jun 13, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The Peeping Tom column…

Kaieteur News – Politics, it was once said, is the art of the possible. But in Guyana, it is often a drama of the improbable: a parade of misalliances, miscalculations, and megalomania, performed before a population too jaded to believe, too weary to resist. Thus, the latest installment in the saga presents itself—an aging sidekick now abandoned, its cape torn and its mask askew, standing alone on the edge of the 2025 general and regional elections. The Alliance For Change (AFC), once the shimmering hope of a middle class tired of racial arithmetic, now finds itself a disheveled actor denied a script, a stage, and an audience.

The AFC, let us recall, was not always a tragic figure. In 2015, it managed to negotiate, under the much-fêted Cummingsburg Accord, a lion’s share of the ministerial pie—40%, to be exact. This was not without controversy. The People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR), seasoned practitioners of power politics, grumbled that the AFC, with what the PNCR believed to be less than 8% of the vote, had secured too much of the banquet.

But therein lies the rub: without that 8%, or perhaps less, the Coalition—APNU+AFC, an acronym masquerading as unity—would have remained in the political wilderness. The PNCR, in their eternal conviction that arithmetic should serve ambition and not vice versa, misjudged the limits of gluttony.

The divorce began with the PNCR’s decision to go solo in the 2018 local government elections, casting the AFC adrift like some unwanted appendage. A power play, yes, but also a harbinger of a deeper betrayal. The PNCR believed, perhaps rightly, that the AFC had secured too much of the spoils. It was under pressure from its supporters to right-size the AFC’s share of the spoils of office. The PNCR supporters, seeking positions of influence, wanted to downsize the AFC.

The gambit employed by the PNCR was simple: prove the AFC electorally feeble and use the results as Exhibit A in the case against any future claims to the positions within government. The AFC was forced to go into the 2018 local government elections alone. And like a moth to the flame of relevance, flailed through those elections and came out burnt.

But power has its own logic and its own karma. The distrust sewn in that unilateral act by the PNCR was not a minor tear—it was a fault line that ran right through the 2020 general elections. The Coalition lost narrowly, and it is the memory of the AFC’s complicity in that botched attempt at electoral alchemy that remains. The AFC did not merely stand by as democracy was kneecapped; it attempted to wear the stained robes of victory, as if legitimacy were just another ministerial portfolio to be distributed. The stain remains, indelible and damning.

Now, the AFC faces its own electoral baptism by fire. Alone, for the first time in general and regional election, since 2011, it must answer the question it has long evaded: does it exist as a political force independent of coalition arithmetic? Will it garner 2% or 8%? Or, to put it more poetically, has the party that once claimed to bridge the chasm between Guyana’s racial poles become a footnote to its own preamble?

This is more than a matter of vote percentages; it is a question of political anthropology. The AFC was, at its conception, a vessel for middle-class aspiration—a promise that the republic could be governed by ideas rather than race, by integrity rather than inheritance. That it chose, in the end, to be a junior partner in realpolitik is no surprise. Idealists in politics are like pianists in a hurricane: one never doubts their talent, only their timing. The party’s most damning crime was not its ambition, but its abandonment of purpose.

To be clear, the PNCR’s greed—its refusal to acknowledge that its path to State House ran through the bridge called AFC—is no less culpable. In their hunger for power and disdain for partnership, they ensured that what began as coalition ended in dissolution. But the AFC’s failure to resist, its eagerness to play the handmaid in the masquerade of 2020, robbed it of the moral high ground it once claimed. The electorate noticed. And the electorate, in time, remembers.

So here we are: 2025 looms, and the AFC must now stand naked before the voters, without the camouflage of coalition, without the leverage of kingmaker status. This is its moment of truth—not the scripted truths of press releases or Facebook Live monologues, but the hard, unblinking truth of ballots and public memory.

If the AFC fails to breach even the modest 8% barrier, it will not merely be an electoral defeat. It will be an obituary. The professional classes—the party’s traditional base—may finally signal that they have moved on, unwilling to mortgage their ideals for a party that pawned its integrity.

But politics, like tragedy, loves a comeback. The question is whether the AFC, now humbled and cornered, has the courage to rediscover its founding soul. If it cannot, then 2025 will not be its Waterloo. It will be its unmarked grave.

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

AFC, Coalition Government, Peeping Tom, PNCR

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