The Carrot and the Count

The Carrot and the Count

OPINION BY: Hem Kumar— August 2026

How the PPP’s Defection Strategy Points Toward 2031

Guyana’s next general election is not four years away. Under the current constitutional timeline, the PPP/C’s term runs to September 2030, with elections due within 90 days of parliament’s dissolution (Article 61) — pushing the actual vote into early 2031. That distinction matters, because what is unfolding in Guyana’s political landscape between now and then is not simply the run-up to a contest.

It is a slower, more consequential process: the deliberate erosion of the opposition’s base through an elite-defection strategy the PPP/C has run openly, effectively, and — so far — with only a partial answer from the other side.

A PATTERN, NOT AN ANECDOTE

The pattern is well documented and still ongoing. James Bond, a prominent former PNC-R executive with real standing among younger and mixed-race Afro-Guyanese voters, crossed to the PPP/C and has said publicly that no one criticized Bharrat Jagdeo and Irfaan Ali more than he once did. Shurwayne Holder — PNC-R’s own sitting Chairman — made the same move, alongside a wider group of former MPs and regional officials: Jermaine Figuiera, Daniel Seeram, Samuel Sandy, Dr. Richard Van-West Charles, Geeta Chandan-Edmond, Ricky Ramsaroop, Dinesh Jaiprashad,  Lennpx Shuman. Josh Kanhai, Asha Kission and several sitting regional councillors. In May 2026 alone, a group of former APNU MPs and councillors crossed together in a single coordinated meeting with Vice President Jagdeo.

VP Jagdeo, Samuel Sandy, James Bond, Jermaine Figueira.

Most recently, Wayne Maison, another PNC-R figure, signaled his support after meeting with the Vice President directly.

The PPP/C is not hiding any of this. Jagdeo has repeatedly cited each crossover publicly as validation of the party’s governance record, describing the wave as evidence of “disillusionment and fragmentation” within PNC/R and APNU, and positioning the PPP/C as a “party of inclusion” open to defectors from anywhere on the political spectrum

The opposition has offered its own explanation, and it deserves to be stated plainly rather than ignored. Opposition Leader Aubrey Norton has dismissed the defections as unsurprising, attributing them to personal resentment — “a lot of them were dissatisfied they didn’t become MPs.” APNU General Secretary Sherwin Benjamin went further, calling the pattern “personal aggrandizement” rather than genuine conviction.

If true, this would reduce the entire trend to a handful of disappointed careerists chasing individual opportunity, with no larger signal for ordinary voters to read into it.

But that explanation grows harder to sustain as the list lengthens and diversifies — MPs, a sitting party Chairman, regional chairmen and vice chairmen, councillors, professionals, moving both individually and in organized groups, over a sustained period rather than a single disgruntled cluster. A pattern this size and this durable is not simply a story about individual career frustration. It is beginning to look like a strategy, and a working one.

THE MECHANISM

The mechanism is straightforward, and it does not require any voter to be fooled. This is not a series of disconnected personal decisions; it is coordinated messaging. Bring over a recognizable figure, publicize his improved standing, let his visible success stand in for an implicit promise to everyone still watching.

The message to any opposition supporter observing from the outside requires no direct persuasion at all: come over, and your life improves too.

Whether that promise is honored in every individual case matters less, politically, than whether it is believed. And there is a reasonable case that it increasingly is. As oil revenue reshapes the state’s capacity to reward loyalty, and as APNU/PNC’s own bench continues to thin, the comparison between the life available on one side and the life available on the other becomes starker — not necessarily because opposition voters are being deceived, but because a growing number of them may be making a rational bet on which party can actually deliver.

THE ARITHMETIC

This is where the long-term arithmetic becomes relevant. The PPP/C currently holds 36 of 65 seats. A two-thirds majority — 44 seats — would open the door to constitutional amendment, including provisions governing presidential term limits.

That is not a prediction; it is a description of what the current trajectory makes possible if the defection pattern continues uninterrupted and translates into proportional vote share by 2031.

Guyanese should understand the stakes of that scenario now, while there is still runway to respond to it — not in the final weeks of a campaign five years from now.

GUYANA IS NOT IMMUNE TO THE PATTERN OIL STATES FOLLOW

None of this unfolds in a vacuum, and Guyana is not the first country to test whether new oil wealth and democratic restraint can coexist.

The academic literature on so-called petrostates is not encouraging. Political scientists who study the “resource curse” have found, across dozens of oil-producing countries, that resource windfalls tend to entrench incumbents rather than unseat them — extending the tenure of ruling parties, weakening the ties between government and citizen that ordinarily come from taxation, and giving incumbents financial advantages that challengers, armed or electoral, struggle to match.

The pattern is not universal or automatic, and the same research shows that peaceful, negotiated transitions remain possible even in oil-rich states — but the base rate runs toward entrenchment, not away from it.

This is not a hypothetical warning imported from elsewhere. UCLA political scientist Michael Ross delivered a lecture directly addressed to this country — titled, without ambiguity, “The Resource Curse and Democracy: Lessons for Guyana” — in which he cautioned that oil wealth threatens free and fair elections by letting incumbents outlast their rivals and consolidate authority while civil society becomes progressively more dependent on the state, and therefore more reluctant to challenge it. The talk was delivered via a June 2020 webinar hosted by the University of Guyana’s GREEN Institute — before first oil turned into the scale of revenue Guyana now manages.                                              It reads, today, less like caution and more like description.

ENTRENCHMENT WITHOUT A STRONGMAN

It would be a mistake, though, to import the standard petrostate narrative wholesale and expect it to play out here exactly as it has elsewhere. The usual caricature of oil-fueled entrenchment is personalist: a single dominant leader, a cult of personality, power concentrated in one man until he dies or is deposed. That is not the shape this is likely to take in Guyana, and understanding why matters for how the country should respond.

The PPP has multiple senior figures with their own standing, their own bases, and their own ambitions for the presidency. That internal reality is precisely what makes collective entrenchment more durable than one-man rule, not less.

Where a single strongman creates a single point of failure — one health crisis, one succession fight, one loss of personal popularity — a party with several leadership aspirants has every incentive to cooperate in defending the system that lets each of them eventually take a turn at the top.

Removing term limits or engineering a durable legislative supermajority does not just benefit whoever is president today ; it preserves the mechanism for whoever leads the party tomorrow.     That gives every ambitious figure inside the party a personal stake in defending and expanding the same structure, and it means the effort to entrench is likely to be pursued through multiple avenues at once — legislative, judicial, administrative, and electoral — rather than through the will of a single man.

A coalition of ambitious leaders defending a shared system can be harder to dislodge than a single ruler defending only himself, because there is no single figure whose fall brings the whole structure down with him.

This is what makes the defection strategy more than a footnote to the entrenchment question. Every recognizable figure absorbed from the opposition is not just a public-relations win. It is a reduction in the number of credible alternatives standing outside the system, and an enlargement of the coalition with a direct personal stake in keeping the system exactly as it is.

WHAT IS ACTUALLY AT STAKE

To be clear about what is being argued here, and what is not: this is not a claim that Guyana is already a one-party state, or that the 2031 election is predetermined. The opposition’s account — that some of these defections reflect personal disappointment rather than mass sentiment — may be true in individual cases even as the aggregate pattern points somewhere more significant.

Both things can be true at once, and a serious accounting of what is happening has to hold them together rather than choosing the more convenient one.

What can be said with confidence is this: a recognizable, escalating strategy is underway; it is being executed by a party with more than one leader who benefits from its success; and if it continues on its current trajectory, it points toward the constitutional threshold that would let a governing coalition rewrite the rules under which it holds power.  Naming that trajectory now, five years before the votes are cast, is not alarmism. It is the minimum work required of anyone who wants Guyana to reach 2031 as a functioning multi-party democracy rather than a one-party state that got there by accumulation rather than by any single dramatic act.

The question the opposition — and the electorate it claims to represent — has not yet answered is what it intends to do about it, beyond hoping the pattern reverses itself.

— The Board

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Source: Michael Ross, “The Resource Curse and Democracy: Lessons for Guyana,” GREEN Institute, University of Guyana (June 2020)