The Adviser Who Discovered One-Party Rule

 The Adviser Who Discovered One-Party Rule

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar September 2026

Lenox Shuman says only the PPP/C is fit to govern Guyana. His own record — and a courtroom accusation he denies — complicate the claim.

Senior Government Adviser on Aviation Lenox Shuman told the Starting Point podcast this week that he does not believe any political party besides the People’s Progressive Party-Civic is currently capable of governing Guyana. He said it of We Invest in Nationhood specifically, accusing the party led by Opposition Leader Azruddin Mohamed of “selfish, narrow interests” and no governing capacity. He extended the same verdict, more gently, to the People’s National Congress Reform, which he described as “but a shadow of its former self.”

Strip away the specific targets and what remains is a broader claim: every party that is not the PPP-C is unfit to govern. In a country where the PPP-C’s own vote share sits well short of unanimous, that is not a critique of WIN or the PNCR. It is an argument that roughly half the electorate backed parties are incapable of governance — which is to say, an argument for indefinite single-party rule, offered as a competence assessment rather than a preference.

A FAMILIAR ARC

Shuman’s own history complicates the position he now holds. He founded the Liberty and Justice Party in 2019, relinquishing his Canadian citizenship to meet the National Assembly’s citizenship requirement, and ran as its presidential candidate in the disputed March 2, 2020 general election. On August 22, 2020 — roughly three weeks after President Irfaan Ali’s government was sworn in — the Office of the President announced Shuman’s appointment as Advisor to the Minister of Public Works on Civil Aviation. Ten days later, on September 1, 2020, he was elected Deputy Speaker of the National Assembly, becoming the first Indigenous Guyanese to hold that post.

The advisory role and the speakership arrived within the same fortnight, at the opening of a government Shuman had just finished running against.

For a period after, Shuman used his position to press the same government on Indigenous rights. In December 2021, he called the administration’s consultation process on mining in the Marudi area a “sham,” arguing it lacked genuine input from affected Amerindian communities. He went further, saying the PPP-C showed “no respect for Amerindians” in its handling of resource-extraction decisions affecting hinterland communities — remarks pointed enough that Prime Minister Mark Phillips issued a public rebuttal accusing Shuman of having “departed from facts.”

The same man who once accused the PPP/C of showing “no respect for Amerindians” now says no other party is fit to be trusted with the country at all.

 That is the reversal worth sitting with. The same man who once accused the PPP-C of showing “no respect for Amerindians” now says no other party is fit to be trusted with the country at all. Whatever changed between 2021 and 2026, it was not the PPP-C’s record on the specific grievance Shuman raised at the time; or if it was, that would itself be worth a public accounting rather than a blanket verdict on everyone else’s fitness to govern.

WHAT WAS PUT TO HIM, UNDER OATH

There is a further complication in the record, and it should be handled with precision. In September 2025, Shuman testified as a prosecution witness in the ongoing trial over alleged fraud in the 2020 general elections, describing his intervention during the disputed Region Four vote tabulation at the Ashmin’s Building. Under cross-examination, defence attorney Eusi Anderson put a direct accusation to him: “Your participation as a candidate in the elections was in effect as a proxy for the People’s Progressive Party Civic.” Shuman rejected it without hesitation. “That suggestion would be incorrect,” he said.

Anderson pressed further, suggesting Shuman had received financial or political benefit from the PPP-C in exchange for his role during the five-month post-election impasse. Shuman denied bias, denied financial links, and denied any arrangement. He did concede two narrower points: that since August 2020 he had never publicly supported the APNU+AFC coalition the way he has supported the PPP-C, and that he had never been employed by or received benefits from that coalition.

None of this establishes that Anderson’s accusation was true. It was a defence attorney’s theory, put to a prosecution witness, in a trial where the accused have an evident interest in undermining that witness’s credibility — and Shuman denied it under oath, on the record, without equivocation. The 592 Guardian is not asserting the proxy-candidate theory as fact. But it is a matter of public record that the theory was put, in open court, to the man who now tells the country which parties may be trusted to govern it. Readers assessing his current claim about WIN and the PNCR are entitled to weigh it against everything else in his public record, including this.

THE UNASKED QUESTION

Shuman built his political identity, before 2020, on Indigenous advocacy: chief of Pakuri, three years as vice-chairman of the National Toshaos Council, a campaign that centred on hinterland neglect. If his position — now restored, following a 2024 resignation to launch an airline venture — carries any of that original mandate, the honest test is not rhetorical. It is what has actually reached Indigenous and hinterland communities on his watch: reliable, affordable interior air service; transparent consultation on extraction projects in Amerindian territories; movement on the exact grievances he himself raised in 2021 and later set aside.

Guyana’s opposition parties are fair targets for scrutiny, and neither WIN nor the PNCR is above the kind of accountability this paper applies to the government.

But the claim that only one party is capable of governing is not a scrutiny of the opposition. It is a request that the public stop weighing alternatives at all.

Before that request is granted, the person making it might first answer what his own years inside the corridors of this government’s power has delivered for the people he was once elected, in part, to speak for.

— The Board