THE lessons from the history of elections in Guyana have demonstrated that the difference between a small party that will go to parliament and the ones that will certainly be relegated to the footnotes, is access to finance. Organic party growth is linear, if party organisers keep building a philosophy, building party groups, keep their visibility and speak to voter issues, they can follow a predictable growth path over time.
There are two main factors that add exponentiality to this otherwise linear trajectory. The first factor is small party message reception has a direct relation to name recognition of the principal actors.
The second factor is access to finance. A small party with access to a trove of cash can punch above its weight, given a short mobilisation window. With these two factors in play, other political ingredients that make a party popular and strong are almost irrelevant to the new small parties. You can throw political ideology, volunteerism, membership investment and institutionalism out the window. These conventional factors hardly feature in the decision to follow and possibly support a newly minted party.
In essence, access to finance by small parties can overlay the need for some of the factors that large parties depend on for their survival. Consider the more successful small parties in Guyana.
The United Force (TUF), Working People’s Alliance (WPA) and the Alliance for Change (AFC), come to mind. The WPA can be excluded from this analysis because its popular iconic leader died before he was tested electorally. The WPA became a shell of itself thereafter, but the political stir it created is indelibly etched into the annals of our political history and requires a separate exposition. With some small differences. TUF and AFC followed almost identical pathways in their growth trajectory, but because of space constraints and recency bias, I will stick to the AFC.
There is no doubt that AFCs exponential growth was buttressed by cash; lots of it. There are unconfirmed reports that AFC received big seed funding from U.S. government sources. What I can confirm though, is that funding came in from literally everywhere, local and overseas, both small and large. AFC was pound for pound as financially strong as any of the two larger parties.
In its initial stages, party work that would normally be done by volunteers and party insiders were done through recruited agents. Standard party operations such as distribution of flyers, community walkabouts, posting of party flags, setting up of equipment etc. were all paid activities in the AFC.
The thing is, AFC had no other choice. It was formed months before the 2006 elections and organising volunteers took time. Recruiting staff was more immediate. I can vividly recall that after the APNU+AFC was formed, Volda Lawrence was shocked and speechless that the AFC had a budgetary allocation to pay people to distribute flyers. An immediate conflict arose as AFC’s “volunteers” expected a stipend while those from APNU were part of the same group doing the same thing, but without similar expectation of payment.
In essence, a solid cash chest will enable small parties to skip many of the long, progressive steps needed to build a party and attract people, especially if it is organised directly before an election. That burst of energy and intense financial outlays needed for a very short period actually helps a small party.
The 2025 elections have the most glaring example yet in our political history. There are four small parties in this year’s election. We can literally write-off two of them for not having sufficient manpower to organise organically nor sufficient cash to overlay this shortcoming. As such, neither the ALP nor FGM is expected to make an electoral impact. The AFC, after suffering unprecedented attrition, is left with a frail party structure and withering middle-class funding. These two factors can combine to produce a minimal impact on the election results.
The other small party in this election is birthed from Team Mohamed’s, whose leader has honed a celebrity type cultic personality through a luxurious flamboyant lifestyle alongside well marketed and publicised charity endeavours.
As outlined above, momentum just prior to an election can cause the natural organic processes to be overlayed the with finance. There is no doubt that Team Mohamed’s has lots of cash, the source uncertain and led by a man who are under severe OFAC financial sanctions. In attempting to use finance to maximise political reach, Team Mohamed’s has taken the concept of political recruitment to debauched levels never before seen in Guyana. They have gone beyond “paid volunteers.” We now have video evidence and other confirmation that the group has been paying attendance fees to “patrons” of public meetings. Normal activities we take for granted as part of our free political expression now have a price. This has a commodifying effect to the 2025 General and Regional Elections to the extent where GECOM acting on intelligence, has outlawed the use of cell phones in the voting booth to prevent vote buying.
A recently uncovered scheme alleges that a photograph of your ballot showing a vote for Team Mohamed’s gets you a reward of $50,000 or more. Of course, this is illegal and can tamper with freewill and corrupt the electoral process. We should use every energy available to us to resist and prevent any further effort, by anyone, to commodify our democracy.