The art of condemnation

Jun 10, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Peeping Tom…

Kaieteur News – Calls for the non-reelection of a sitting president are nothing new in politics. They are, in fact, necessary utterances—manifestations of political health. But to be worthy of a democratic audience, such calls must be grounded in the rigour of argument and the discipline of fact.

They must reach for truth rather than simply revel in volume. Increasingly, however, what passes for critique is little more than declaration, a performance of outrage divorced from the slow and thankless work of substantiation.

Of late, a swelling chorus of discontent has taken aim at the President, issuing damning judgments and sweeping condemnations, calling for his removal not through the ballot-box, but by a campaign of moral exhaustion. These criticisms are rarely light on confidence. They come dressed in the language of national injury, betrayal, even desecration. But the closer one reads—or listens—the less one finds. Assertions multiply, evidence withers.

The President, we are told, governs not with the impartiality demanded by office, but with the instincts of a loyal partisan, favouring his party over the people, and friends over fairness. Yet such accusations rest more on inference than inquiry. They allege without illuminating. To hear the critics, the machinery of state is no longer operated by law or principle, but by whisper and reward, by proximity to power rather than any demonstrated competence. But where is the data? Where are the comparisons, the patterns, the smoking memos, the whistleblowers? Instead, what we get are insinuations of “culture,” “closeness,” “connections”—the soft tissue of grievance, not the hard bone of fact.

Take the increasingly popular claim that the President is complicit in economic arrangements designed to benefit the few while impoverishing the many. Critics speak of sweetheart deals, concealed projects, and the dark sorcery of tax waivers. Yet there is little appetite to wrestle with the machinery of procurement law, the complexities of foreign investment, or the strategic calculus of industrial policy in a resource-hungry economy. All nuance is abandoned in favour of theatrical disdain. One hears that certain projects “do not appear” in the national budget—as though the absence of a project name in a document becomes conclusive proof of fiscal misconduct. It’s an argument that would struggle to pass even in the court of public opinion, let alone in any serious institutional review.

The criticisms go further. We are told that justice is no longer blind, but selectively applied; that commissions function not to uncover but to obscure; and that state oversight bodies exist only to gather dust and salaries. These are serious charges. But again, they arrive not via legal findings, audited reports, or insider testimonies, but as pronouncements. The sinews of the accusations are slack. The critics do not pause to examine what laws constrain judicial appointments, what institutional deadlocks paralyze reform, or what practical obstacles plague oversight offices across administrations. The collapse of context is total.

At times, the language takes on a forensic tone, invoking phrases like “accessory to tax evasion” or “violations of anti-money laundering rules.” Yet the legal vocabulary is hollowed out by the absence of legal process. The standard of proof has been inverted: suspicion is proof, and silence is confession. The critics do not present findings—they present moods.

Even personal tragedy is not spared the conscription into political narrative. The loss of young lives becomes a pivot point for sweeping assertions of moral failure. Rather than grieving with dignity or asking carefully what systemic failures contributed to such horrors, critics pivot immediately to cynicism. Every inquiry becomes a whitewash, every silence a smirk. They do not distinguish between the messy imperfection of governance and the orchestrated evils of tyranny. For them, failure is always intentional.

The criticisms often climax with a pseudo-historical narrative. We are reminded that trust was once given—perhaps generously so. The President, they say, was embraced by a hopeful nation, defended in the wake of electoral crisis. And now, the betrayal is complete. This tidy arc—hope to heartbreak—makes for good theatre. But it reduces a thousand complexities of governance, diplomacy, coalition, and compromise into the tired tropes of Shakespearean drama. What is missing from all of this—glaringly—is the recognition that governance in a developing state, especially one newly navigating the torrents of oil wealth, is not the domain of saints or villains. It is the daily negotiation of imperfect choices under the unbearable weight of expectation. The critiques calling for the President’s political exile confuse disappointment with illegitimacy. They mistake missteps for malevolence. And in doing so, they flatten the entire democratic experiment into a single binary: resign or rot. To demand a leader’s resignation or non-reelection is no trivial thing. In serious republics, it requires the burden of proof, not just the burden of passion. It demands scrutiny of the facts, not just performance of virtue. The state may very well need reform; the President, criticism. But what it needs most is for that criticism to be responsible, reasoned, and real. Otherwise, democracy is not strengthened by critique. It is drowned in it.

condemnation, Election Guyana, Guyana politics, non-reelection, Peeping Tom

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