Harassment that strengthens
Aug 22, 2025
Kaieteur News – In the last six weeks, Guyana has been unsettled by a most curious development. A new party, We Invest in Nationhood (WIN), has emerged and acquired a following that surprises even its sympathizers. It has no political pedigree. It does not come out of the long trench of political history where parties are born, nurtured, and aged. It is not like the traditional giants, the PNCR and the PPP, that trace their lineage to independence struggles and to old creeds of socialism or race. It is a newcomer, improvised, built around one man and his rich and kindhearted family. And yet it has drawn a support that speaks not of ordinary allegiance but of protest.
No one expected this. Political parties in Guyana are usually products of tribal loyalties. Their strength comes from geography, ancestry, and ingrained lines of division. WIN has no such resource.
What it has instead is a story. A story of a man who, having risen, is then beaten down by the powers that be. And in his downfall, the underclass sees its own condition. They see the humiliations they suffer daily. And in the abuse heaped on the Mohameds, they see the pattern of their own abasement.
Much of the support that WIN enjoys is not about programme or policy. It is about rejection. It is the rejection of a system that has left the underclasses without a future. It is also the rejection of two parties that have dominated the state for half a century and have made of politics a monopoly, a sealed door to others. It is, more so, a rejection, above all, of what people perceive as the use of state power to pulverize Mohamed and his family. In that crushing, in that act of kicking a man when he is down, the people find a cause. And so they say that the more he is kicked, the more we will stand with him. It is not reasoned politics, but it is solidarity in its most primal form.
The government does not see this. Or perhaps it does and believes that it can bludgeon the new party into submission. But the evidence is before us. Every new act of harassment against WIN does not weaken it. It makes it stronger.
The Carter Centre has spoken of impediments placed before WIN in its effort to contest the elections. The public sees something darker. They see an attempt at coercion and the use of state power to block the simple right of a citizen to compete for power. And each such attempt deepens the impression of a government that is afraid, a government that is vindictive.
The latest incident in Skeldon was almost banal in its ordinariness. Traffic ranks have the right to stop a motorist. That is not disputed. But to stop a vehicle, to hold the driver waiting idly by the roadside while the ranks go about their errands—this is not enforcement but harassment. It is an unreasonable use of power. It is a demonstration of authority for authority’s sake. And because it happened on the day WIN was holding a meeting, the symbolism was unavoidable. What may have been petty in design becomes grand in its effect.
The people do not see traffic regulation. They see persecution.
The consequence is that WIN gains a strength it could not have earned on its own. Left alone, it would have been an experiment, a curiosity, perhaps a passing excitement.
But WIN has a terminal weakness. Its weakness is that its programme does not speak the radical language of the underclasses. It speaks instead the language of reform, a softer thing, a thing which in the end may be co-opted by the very bourgeois state it sets out to oppose. This is the paradox of WIN. It wins the sympathy of the lumpen not because it promises them to overturn an oppressive situation, but because it is harassed.
In Guyana today, politics has little to do with programmes. The people have heard promises before. They have heard of houses, of jobs, of investments, of highways, pensions, wage increases and cash grants. They do not believe.
What they do believe in is the spectacle of a man persecuted. They know what it means to be stopped on the road for no reason, to be left standing while an officer exercises his power idly. They know what it is to be pushed down when one is already on the ground. That knowledge is intimate. And in Mohamed they see a reflection of themselves.
The government, in its blindness, does not calculate this. It imagines that harassment will diminish the man and his party. It does not see that every act of persecution enlarges him.
He grows in stature precisely because he is attacked. And the underclasses, for whom politics has been only the management of their despair, are awakening to the possibility of resistance—not through grand ideologies, but through loyalty to the man who is being hunted and tormented.
This is the new current in the country. It is not clear if it will endure. It may dissipate when votes are counted, for WIN has yet to offer a vision that truly overturns the existing order.
But for now it is real. It is alive. And it tells us something deep about Guyana: that the people are prepared to say, in their rough way, “The more you strike him, the more we will stand with him.”
That is not weakness. That is power.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)
