Seats, Not Substance

Seats, Not Substance

EDITORIAL BY: Staff Writer— August 2026

A question about oil revenue, a dismissive reply, and what both reveal about how power is actually exercised in Guyana

 A SIMPLE question travelled across social media this week: how much money is Guyana actually making from its oil industry? It was posed by Azruddin Mohamed, Leader of the Opposition, whose own legal and political circumstances remain, by any measure, unsettled and contested. But the question does not belong to the man who asked it. It belongs to every Guyanese citizen with a stake in how the nation’s resource wealth is accounted for and disbursed.

This Board has not been shy about the questions surrounding Mr. Mohamed’s own conduct, nor about the criminal allegations he faces — allegations that, notably, implicate the same governing apparatus he now positions himself against. Those matters are serious and remain before the appropriate authorities. They do not, however, disqualify a straightforward question of public accountability from deserving a straightforward answer.

THE REPLY THAT MATTERED MORE THAN THE QUESTION

What has struck this Board is not the question itself, but the character of the response it drew. Among the replies, one — from a commenter identified as Andy Rampersaud — dispensed with the substance entirely:

“This man don’t understand he don’t have no power in parliament, he don’t have enough seats.”

— Andy Rampersaud, in a social media comment

Set aside, for a moment, who said it and about whom. Read as a statement of political principle, it is one of the more revealing sentences to circulate in Guyanese public discourse this year.         It does not dispute the question. It does not defend the government’s record on oil revenue transparency. It simply asserts that a question from a numerically weak opposition need not be answered at all — that legitimacy in Guyanese politics flows from seat count, not from the substance of what is asked or the public’s right to know it.

That is, in a sentence, the operating logic this Board has warned consistently against  under a different name: governance by arithmetic. A majority in the National Assembly is treated not as a mandate to govern accountably, but as a release from the obligation to answer at all.

Opposition, on this logic, is not a check on power — it is a formality to be tolerated until the numbers change.

AN UNCOMFORTABLE MIRROR

It is worth asking, in this Board’s view, why this dynamic feels newly visible now. For years, an opposition built substantially around PNC support was met with a similar dismissiveness — one this Board suspects was never only about seat count, but also about which Guyanese communities that party has historically represented. Questions raised by that opposition were, too often, treated as tribal noise rather than legitimate scrutiny.

Mr. Mohamed’s rise complicates that old pattern, whatever one makes of the man. His base draws support across communities that have not traditionally rallied behind the PNC, which makes Rampersaud’s dismissal harder to read as simple ethnic reflex — and forces a more uncomfortable question into view: was the dismissiveness ever really about ethnicity at all, or was ethnicity merely the language available to describe a deeper contempt for opposition as such?

This Board offers that reading cautiously, as interpretation rather than settled fact — voter motivation is not something any commentator can verify from a comment thread. But the pattern is suggestive enough to name: if a minority-coded opposition and a numerically-weak but multi-ethnic opposition draw the same reflexive dismissal, the common denominator may not be ethnicity. 

It may simply be an entrenched belief that opposition, of any composition, has no standing to demand answers.

THE DEMAND THIS MOMENT INVITES

Guyanese citizens do not need to resolve their views on Azruddin Mohamed the man to insist on an answer to the question he raised. Nor should they need to wait for the next election cycle to demand that a governing majority account for the nation’s oil revenue in specific, auditable terms.

A parliamentary majority is a mandate to govern. It has never been, and must never be treated as, an exemption from having to explain.

The real challenge this moment poses is not to any one politician. It is to every Guyanese who has assumed that dismissing an opposition voice was simply the way politics works here — and to ask, plainly, whether that assumption has ever served the public interest, or only ever served the comfort of whoever currently holds the seats. — The Board