The Unkindest Cut

Jun 20, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Kaieteur News – Building a pre-election coalition is never easy. It takes more than meetings. It takes more than deals. It takes a foundation of trust, a commitment to principle, and a shared vision for the future. Without these, coalitions fall apart before they even begin.

David Granger knew this better than most. He had led a coalition government. He had seen the strengths and the failures of such arrangements. That is why he warned that coalitions must be built on policies and programmes, not on positions and power. His words were not just theory—they were born of hard political experience. They were a lesson to anyone attempting to build a united front against the ruling PPP.

Forbes Burnham had said plainly that he would never again lead the PNCR into a coalition. He did not need to. He resorted to rigging elections to stay in power. This is why the 2015 Cummingsburg Accord was of such historic significance. Unfortunately, that coalition held together only in form; but never in substance. Granger would have been a witness to the problems associated with coalitions between parties of vastly unequal strengths.

The PNCR and the AFC had engaged in negotiations aimed at forming a pre-election coalition. Unfortunately, it does not appear that either party had heeded Granger’s wisdom. Instead of focusing on a common programme of action, the negotiations, it would appear, were mired in talk about seats, portfolios, and who would get what after the election.

It appears that little attention paid to what a coalition would do for the people. No bold plans. No policy agreements. Just old-fashioned horse-trading.

But the greatest failure of all—the most devastating blow—was not about policies. It was about trust. Trust is the oxygen of any coalition. Without it, nothing survives. And in this case, that trust was shattered, not by those who left the AFC, but by those who poached them.

Three senior members of the AFC reportedly have defected to the PNCR. That in itself is not unusual in politics. People change allegiances. People have a right to defect. But what made this different was the context.

The AFC and PNCR were months ago in coalition talks. They were supposed to be working together to build a united platform. They were supposed to be partners- in-the-making. And yet, after these talks reached an impasse, the PNCR reached into the leadership of the AFC and pulled out key individuals. Even if the persons made the approaches, the PNCR should have refused.

By accepting these high-level defections, the PNCR has weakened the AFC from within. And it was done at time when there was still a flicker of hope that a pre-election coalition could have still been arrived at. That is the unkindest cut of all.

No coalition can survive such a move. No party can be expected to continue negotiations after its very leadership has been undermined by a party with which it had hoped to form a pre-election coalition. The PNCR has acted in bad faith.

The AFC has every right to feel upset. It had invested time and political capital into talks about coalition in order to pose a credible challenge to the PPP. But instead of partnership, it received a knife in the back. And let us be clear: the knife was not held by the defectors. It was held by the PNCR.

They made the choice to poach. They made the choice to breach the unwritten rules of alliance-building. They made the choice to destroy the very trust on which a coalition must stand.

Now, any talk of resuming coalition discussions is pure fantasy. The bridge has been burned. The damage is irreversible. What began as a shaky effort at unity has ended in division and mistrust.

The AFC cannot—and should not—enter into any further discussions with the PNCR. Not now. Not after what has happened.

To do so would be to ignore the most basic lesson of coalition-building: That without trust, there is nothing.

The PNCR has shown it cannot be trusted as a coalition partner. It has acted not as a collaborator but as a competitor. It has not sought consensus; it has sought control. And in doing so, it has destroyed any remaining hope of a pre-election alliance.

It is not enough to want to remove the PPP from office. That cannot be the sole objective of any political alliance. Because if that is all you have, you will not know what to do once you get there. Power cannot be the destination. It must be the means to a higher end—governance, service, reform. That is what Granger understood. That is what is now lost.

(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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