The ‘Insiders’ are Now Welcome to WIN

…the APNU and AFC’s political plotting has bitten them in the Azz

When Donald Trump – a petulant nepo-baby who built a political reputation by complaining that he would fix the same corrupt system upon which his family built their wealth – decided to finally run for political office, he did so on a campaign that he was a political outsider that would ‘drain the swamp’ when he assumed office. Instead, his first term – as the official Republican nominee elected to office – saw him gleefully bathing in it like some wispy-haired, orange Shrek, with his cabinet and supporting machinery consisting of a battalion of the very sort of insider that he vowed to get rid of. What happened was that a Republican establishment, unable to find anyone of credibility or charisma within its core, found a willing celebrity with no real policy vision and boosted him on a populist platform to the highest public office in America, from which they would then manipulate him to execute their ideological agenda.

Trump seems to have found a parallel in Guyana with the Azruddin Mohamed political run. Mohamed, who over the past four years developed a carefully curated social media image of popular billionaire playboy with a heart of gold, fairly recently officially launched a long-telegraphed political bid to be President, one that has had some key hallmarks of Trump’s bluster, tendency to misinform, and a calculating populist approach that falls apart with too much scrutiny.

Like Trump, Mohamed has a tendency to make ludicrous, false claims and either double down on them in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, or make a reluctant concession when left without a choice, or pretend that they weren’t made in the first place. For example, he claimed to have conducted a poll that saw 65 percent of 80,000 respondent voters saying that they would vote for him for President, a figure he publicly represented but has not repeated since. Then there was the contortion with the jaguar versus leopard issue. And the claim that NGSA had record low results, part of a steady decline when the results as well as the four-year trend showed the exact opposite. And then there was the claim that 10,000 people attended the Nomination Day rally, a gross exaggeration in line with Trump’s inflation of crowd sizes.

Then there is the populism. Mohamed emerged within the past four years as Guyana’s greatest celebrity, much like post-Apprentice Trump. His carefully curated social media flaunting of tremendous wealth was tempered by increasingly publicised acts of the sort of generous charity his father had a solid but quiet reputation for. This popularity came with increasing encouragement that he should consider public office until like pre-second term Trump, the OFAC Sanctions hit. What might otherwise have been a catastrophe for political ambition became just the opposite – a catalyst.

The acts of charity were no longer photo ops but increasingly less oblique critiques of the system that allowed such poverty. The infamous tax-proof Lamborghini (look out for our feature next week) in the middle of the perpetual poverty of Tiger Bay; a battalion of influencers both foreign and local to replace his erstwhile friend Mikhael Rodrigues, the Guyanese Critic; and a charmingly obese and precocious toddler from Bartica urging him to be President – Mohamed’s transition into the political arena was as smooth as a social media segue into politics as you can get, a cash-money millionaire turned man of the people, while the formal political opposition was struggling with both political and actual capital.

For example, in 2023, as Mohamed’s star was rising, a month before the damning Reuters article that presaged the OFAC sanctions, the former coalition partners had a grim reality check on their electoral standing. The APNU (meaning the PNC) could barely muster candidates and financing to even compete in just 279 out of the 610 in that year’s Local Government Elections, while the AFC did not contest at all, leaving the PPP to an unprecedented electoral wipeout.

By the time Mohamed officially announced his entry into the 2025 race two months ago, the fortunes of the former coalition partners had deteriorated even further. What was supposed to be a Messianic Movement helmed by Nigel Hughes first taking over the AFC and then the PNC quickly fizzled out into a petty game of coalition negotiation postures out of which it was Aubrey Norton that emerged victorious.

Even before all of that however, there was a tacit, but clearly coordinated agreement between the APNU and AFC (and their surrogates) to let Mohamed run without interference or opposition from them – indeed, with enthusiastic defence and encouragement in many cases. The Indian Azruddin was supposed to make inroads into the PPP’s Indian Guyanese base, while Hughes would consolidate the African Guyanese base and make inroads into the Amerindian communities to hobble together a majority. In March, AFC leaders, Nigel Hughes and Raphael Trotman met with Mohamed and his father, and shortly after AFC activists Gobin Harbhajan, Charles Sugrim and Veersammy Ramayya among others were suddenly appearing with Mohamed on his outreaches.

Still, when Mohamed eventually launched his party, We Invest in Nationhood (“nationhood (noun) – the fact or status of being a nation; national identity or independence), he was faced with an initial problem. He had zero political legitimacy with established people while the PPP at whom he was aimed was picking up endorsement after endorsement. Whoever is running his campaign decided that the best strategy was to double down on the poor people populism front, and so his new Facebook launched with a campaign based on the sentiment that “The only endorsement that matters is the endorsement of the people”. This would eventually be amended to read, “Real endorsements come from real people, not political insiders”. (It should be noted that the AFC, also suffering from an absence of significant endorsements or acquisitions, began to run its own ‘real people endorse Hughes’ social media campaign.)

For Mohamed, it was a desperate deflection of the reality that, with the OFAC sanctions hanging him over him and with an absence of any comprehensive or even basic policy credentials, no credible political player would join with him. No credible player political did, but a long-telegraphed coalition agreement with a severely diminished ANUG under that party’s sketchy Chair (See our story, ‘The Opporteuthanist That Killed ANUG) opened the door to what would be a mini flood of other not credible or significant endorsements. Starting with the AFC’s Mark Goring, the WIN acquisitions notably grew to eventually include former PNC member and APNU+AFC MP, Natasha Singh-Lewis (PNC); former WPA member, Granger administration minister and APNU+AFC MP, Tabitha Sarabo-Halley; former WPA member and Tabitha’s husband Cleon Halley; and, then, the biggest catch of all, Dawn Hastings, former PNC General Secretary, former APNU+AFC parliamentarian, and former multi-portfolio Granger administration minister with her final assignment being replacing Joseph Harmon, Granger’s effective Hand of the King, as Minister of State.

Remember that rhetoric about rejecting the insiders and needing only the endorsements of ordinary people? The posts with that sort of sentiment have trickled to a stop. Today, the WIN campaign ‘executive’ is made up almost exclusively of formerly high-level APNU+AFC insiders or former sympathisers, with the exception of his sister, Hana. There is no one in even Norton’s current candidate list that has had a position and portfolio on par with Dawn Hastings, whether in government or in the PNC machinery. The only persons higher than or on par with her in the former administration’s hierarchy would be former Prime Minister Nagamootoo, former Vice Presidents Carl Greenidge, Sidney Allicock and Khemraj Ramjattan (yes, they were that many), former Minister of State Joseph Harmon, and Granger himself. Of those, Ramjattan as an executive of the AFC, has made a de facto endorsement of Hughes whose practice he essentially now works for or from, and Allicock has endorsed President Irfaan Ali. None of the others have directly endorsed Norton or Hughes.

The caption of WIN’s photo of the meeting with the Carter Center reads: “WIN reaffirms its commitment to the principles of free and fair elections, which are essential to the preservation of our democracy. We would like to thank the Carter Center and other stakeholders for their efforts to listen to the concerns raised by political parties and their commitment to strengthening the integrity and effectiveness of our electoral processes.“

This while posing with former members of a political machinery that oversaw the attempted rigging five years ago, none of whom have since even conceded that the Coalition lost those 2020 elections, much less admit and expressed remorse for their participation in or critical support of the attack on the “principles of free and fair elections.” In fact, when the Carter Center was banned from returning to Guyana to observe the 2020 Recount, almost every member of the current WIN executive was part of the government doing the banning. When it comes to the rigging attempt of 2020 and shameless critical support of the lies surrounding it, WIN’s executive is as “insider” as you can get. And then there is the addition of Duarte Hetsberger, the former right hand man to disgraced former GECOM CEO and election interference defendant, Keith Lowenfield. Fired from GECOM for unauthorised tampering with the Commission’s computers, Hetsberger made his first significant public appearance as part of WIN’s Nomination Day team that submitted its list to the same Commission.

As with the Republican machinations that elevated Trump, Mohamed has become a Frankensteinian creature that is now devastating the political fortunes of the very people that created it. The inroads he has made have been overwhelming at the expense of the PNC. The Nominations Day mobilization including bussing people from Linden when PPP strongholds are far closer, on the East Coast, East Bank, West Coast and West Bank. The encouragement and defence that originally came from the Coalition, the PNC in particular, have not metamorphosed into originally oblique but increasingly direct critique, with the most recent charge – one that couldn’t be more ironic were it a collaborative masterpiece of Henry and Chopin – that Mohamed and the PPP would reconcile after elections.

Mohamed, unlike Trump, is not going to go anywhere near the Presidency. The numbers don’t favour him and even his insider machinery does not have the institutional memory, competence or basic administrative capacity of either the PPP or PNC. That is why his initial candidate list, even with Hetsberger on his team, was defective. Sometime within the past year, someone made a gross error in miscalculation when they decided to manipulate a popular public figure with latent political ambition into running an active campaign intended to damage their political opponent. It worked in the United States. It is failing here to the point it has backfired. One of my favourite songs is ‘This Night’ by a band call Black Lab – I first heard it on an episode of House – in which a man contemplates the consequences of his actions:

“There are things I have done/ There’s a place I have gone/ There’s a beast I let run/ Now it’s running my way.”

As for Mohamed, unlike Trump, the Insiders he has gathered around him will come off way better than he could. His campaign is primarily self-funded and hence will constitute a loss of hundreds of millions when his commercial revenue stream has been cut off – he is receiving cash quietly from persons who don’t want their financial or other association with him on paper, but that still constitutes a loss. He will not win the Presidency and he will not get enough seats to even be Opposition Leader. He will not even have control of the at best handful of WIN Parliamentarians since, while he is Presidential Candidate, the List Representative is former Coalition-aligned comedian, Odessa Primus. And that, my friends, is the crowning joke of this farce.