Given that this is the last Ruminations before Elections 2025, this is an opportune time for the column to make its Elections 2025 endorsement and prediction. Ruminations strongly endorses President Irfaan Ali to serve a second five-year term. We predict that he will win by a landslide, with the PPP winning its biggest-ever electoral victory in a free and fair election. In 2006, President Bharat Jagdeo led the PPP to a historic 36-seat victory. The PPP is likely to equal this performance, if not eclipse its 2006 victory margin.
We predict that the PNC will retain its place as the main opposition party and that Aubrey Norton will remain opposition leader, at least, until the PNC replaces him as leader. We predict that the AFC will not win a single seat and that both Amanza Walton-Desir and Simona Broomes will be decimated with no more than a handful of votes. While it is possible for Azrudin Mohamed to win a seat in Parliament, the prohibition of cell phones in the voting booth will have a serious dent on this possibility. Azrudin Mohamed will be sorely disappointed because the number of votes he will garner will be far below what he genuinely believes he will get.
Voting for Elections 2025 started on Friday, August 22, when more about 10,000 members of the Disciplined Services, including police, military, firefighters and prison officer, voted in what was regarded as smooth-sailing. There were no meaningful hiccups. Other than an accident that led to some polling agents, a police officer and a GECOM staff, all of whom were treated and subsequently discharged, the process was reported to have been conducted with complete professionalism. In five days, on September 1st, about 500,000 Guyanese are likely to show up for voting. Guyana must decide whether to stay the course or to choose another pathway.
As Guyana decides, the major consideration for the people’s decision-making is which candidate is best qualified to be president. Ruminations will not go through the analysis, but to say that when the credentials of the candidates are considered, President Irfaan Ali is clearly way ahead of the others. Besides being tested, tried and trusted, President Ali is respected, admired and loved across the country and has become internationally-recognized as a global leader in food, climate and energy security and biodiversity preservation . Aubrey Norton is not even respected and trusted in his own party. Azrudin Mohamed most distinguishing credential is that he is internationally-sanctioned, is unable to travel outside of Guyana, maybe with the exception of visiting Venezuela. He has been sanctioned by the most powerful country in the world, the United States of America, for gold smuggling, money laundering and tax evasion.
An equally important consideration for citizens is that a president cannot run the country by himself or herself. Unless a president have access to a list of candidates with highly qualified people from which to choose a cabinet, his or her cabinet will be a disaster. President Ali will have dozens of candidates from which to choose any of the cabinet members. There are several qualified candidates for each ministerial position in the lists the PPP presented to the nation. There is no candidate on any of the other lists that can, for example, compare to Minister Ashni Singh for the finance ministry; Minister Priya Manikchand for education; Minister Frank Anthony for health, etc.
Of the other lists, none can form a credible government. Azrudin Mohamed’s party, a party he “owns”, rather than lead, has no candidate that can take up any of the ministry. His associate, “Doggie”, has proclaimed himself the Finance Minister and sometimes, even the Home Affairs Minister. Another follower has declared that she will be the Vice President and yet another has declared he would be the Attorney General. Azrudin Mohamed has not denied these declarations. Ruminations has previously challenged Azrudin Mohamed to make a clear and definitive statement whether these persons are members of his party and whether they have been offered or will be in contention for any cabinet position. His silence is both weird and worrisome.
Outside of who would be president, and their ability to form a credible government, policies and plans are critical. On the security front, the PPP has promised to hire more police officers, pay them better, create better opportunities for training and promotion and provide first-world technology and training. The PPP promises security cameras on every street in every community throughout Guyana. “Doggie”, with claims of speaking for Azrudin Mohamed, declared that the first thing Azrudin will do is to release all prisoners. With such asinine policy, who could take this seriously? But Azrudin has remained silent. It is as asinine as a PNC/APNU candidate insisting that “sugar is dead; we will plant hemp and marijuana”.
Perhaps the most outrageous proposal comes from the AFC. They have proposed to replace the present non-contributory pension system in place for public service employees and employees of public corporations such as GUYSUCO with a mandatory 10% contributory pension scheme. Why would anyone support such a proposal. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
The opposition has even presented promises that have already been delivered. For example, they will reduce bridge tolls when the bridge tolls are already zero. They even claim they will make education from “nursery to university” free when this has already been achieved. But maybe this means that they will reverse the PPP’s elimination of bridge tolls and free university.
It is clear that there is no strong opposition to the PPP and President Irfaan Ali. The PPP is way ahead as the frontrunner in Elections 2025. It will take a real miracle for any party to stop the PPP from its biggest ever electoral victory.
