THE 592 GUARDIAN♦OPINION♦POLITICS                OP- ED                                                                                              BY: Hem Kumar

Aubrey Norton’s Unearned Throne

Defeated, deserted, and demoted to third place, the PNCR/APNU leader still acts as though the mandate never left him — and Guyana’s democracy is paying the price.

The 592 Guardian Editorial Board  |  June, 2026

Aubrey Compton Norton answers to several titles. He is Leader of the People’s National Congress Reform. He is Chairman, and Representative of the List of Candidates, for A Partnership for National Unity. What he is not, and has not been since the night of September 6, 2025, is Leader of the Opposition. That office now belongs to Azruddin Mohammed, whose three-month-old We Invest in Nationhood party did what six decades of PNC machinery never expected : it  pushed Norton’s coalition into third place. The titles Norton still holds describe a man running a smaller and smaller room.

 The numbers are not contestable, because they are GECOM’s own. APNU went from 31 seats in the previous National Assembly to 12 in this one — the worst result in the coalition’s history, and the first time since its founding that it failed to carry a single region. Georgetown, the capital the PNC effectively owned for the better part of six decades, fell to the PPP/C for the first time, by a margin of nearly two to one. WIN’s 16 seats made it the country’s new official opposition. Norton’s APNU, with its 12, is now the third force in a parliament it once dominated.

This was not a setback. It was a dismantling, and Norton was the man at the wheel when it happened.

What followed was supposed to be a reckoning. Instead it has been a kind of stage management. Norton has not called a single General Council meeting of his own party since the defeat. The PNCR’s Congress — the one body with actual authority to replace him — has been pushed back to 2027, on his own say-so, in the name of “consolidation.” In June, with the wreckage of September still being swept up, he told a WPA-aligned broadcast that he is prepared to stand for the party leadership again, having already ruled himself out only for the presidency. A man who led his party to its historic floor has positioned himself as the only person qualified to lead its recovery. That is not humility. That is occupancy.

The exodus continued anyway, and it has not gone where a healthy opposition’s defectors should go.

In May, a fresh group of former APNU parliamentarians and sitting regional councillors — Ricky Ramsaroop, Shurwayne Holder, Dinesh Jaiprashad, Ravoldo Birbal, Sheik Yaseen, Prince Holder, and Gangadai Lloyd — sat down with PPP General Secretary Bharrat Jagdeo and declared themselves part of his party’s political family. They joined a list that already included former PNC stalwarts James Bond, Jermaine Figueira, Geeta Chandan-Edmond, Richard Van West Charles, Daniel Seeram, and Samuel Sandy.

Notice the direction of travel. These were not disillusioned PNC supporters drifting toward WIN, the upstart that actually defeated Norton’s coalition at the polls. They walked directly into the government’s camp. For the party’s base, this has landed as a double shot of sobriety: a historic loss at the ballot box, compounded by a leadership that keeps quietly handing the winners more of its own people. Every PNC defector who lands at Freedom House rather than at WIN’s door is not a wandering vote. He is a transfer payment from the opposition to the government — and Norton’s coalition has been making those payments on a near-monthly basis.

Norton’s own account of all this is that nobody should be surprised, that the departing members had signaled their intentions for some time, that defection is simply what happens to parties out of power. He is, in other words, narrating his own hemorrhage as background noise. His party’s General Secretary, Sherwin Benjamin, called the May defections an act of “personal aggrandizement.” Norton called it predictable. Neither man called it a leadership failure — which is the one explanation the evidence actually supports.

He has not lacked for warning. Former Georgetown Mayor Ubraj Narine resigned from the PNCR in November, saying the party had been “hemorrhaging internally and externally.” In May, in a public letter, he went further, telling Norton plainly that he had to step aside or watch the PNCR lose the one stronghold it has held since Forbes Burnham built it — City Hall itself. Norton’s answer was silence, followed by a renewed bid for his own job.

 It is against this backdrop — third place, a bleeding caucus, a postponed Congress, a leader the public record shows clinging rather than rebuilding — that Norton has chosen to assert himself on a matter of real constitutional consequence. As this media outfit  reported this week, Azruddin Mohamed, the man who now holds the office Norton lost, has moved to replace the three long-serving opposition-nominated GECOM commissioners, arguing that their tenure traces to a parliamentary mandate that no longer exists. Norton’s reply, offered without engaging the constitutional argument Mohamed actually made, amounted to a flat denial: “no vacancy exists,” he said, unless a sitting commissioner dies or resigns.

That is not a constitutional position. It is a veto, asserted by a leader the architecture of the Constitution no longer recognizes as the opposition’s voice.

A claim made over commissioners who were never his appointees to begin with — Charles Corbin, Desmond Trotman, and Vincent Alexander were advised upon by a previous opposition leader representing a different party and a different mandate entirely. Norton wants the authority of an office he does not hold, exercised over appointments he did not make, to outlast an election he comprehensively lost. That is the kind of unchecked, informal power this board has in mind, and it is not an isolated incident. It is the pattern.

It would be one thing if Norton’s caution were a strategic choice his own coalition endorsed. It is not. Within APNU itself, voices including parliamentarians Terrence Campbell and David Hinds have called for the kind of social mobilization an opposition reduced to twelve seats might actually need to make itself heard against a government with thirty-six. Norton has offered no comparable urgency — only consolidation, only continuity, only himself.

None of this serves the PNC’s supporters, the generations of Afro-Guyanese voters whose loyalty built the party Norton now administers. It serves the government he is nominally there to check.

A demoralized, third-place opposition that cannot hold its own councillors, cannot convene its own Congress, and spends its remaining credibility defending GECOM appointments nobody currently mandates him to defend is not an obstacle to the PPP/C’s continued dominance. It is a convenience. Whatever Norton intends, the effect of his refusal to leave is to aid and abet the very consolidation of power his party was founded to resist.

A leader who will not yield the chair, in a moment that calls for renewal, is not protecting the opposition. He is one of the quiet guarantees of its continued weakness — and in a country where unchecked executive power is the actual and growing danger, that guarantee is itself a clear and present danger to the growth of any credible check on the state.

Someone in the PNC needs to bell this cat. The party, and the country, cannot wait much longer for that someone to arrive.

— The 592 Guardian Editorial Board