Members of the Peoples National Congress Reform have the future and wellbeing of the Party in their hands. At the coming Biennial Congress, they must elect a Leader, Chairman, two Vice-chairmen, a Treasurer and fifteen members of the Central Executive Committee. On the surface this is a routine process that happens at every Biennial Congress which is held on average every two years. However, this time it is different.
At the last Congress, the members overwhelmingly elected Mr. Aubrey C. Norton to lead the Party. This was after a rigorous campaign, with all three candidates, then Opposition Leader, Mr. Joe Harmon, Dr. Richard Van West Charles, and Mr. Norton, making pledges of unity and committing to work for the Party win or lose. After Mr. Norton’s overwhelming victory, Mr. Joe Harmon withdrew from the Party, and while Dr. Van West Charles agreed to be an advisor, he soon jumped ship over disagreement about policy and how the Party should relate to the PPP. However, this is not half of it.
A core of senior supporters of both Harmon and Van West Charles, rejected the decisions of the membership, and immediately launched a vicious campaign against Aubrey Norton. They first declared that he cannot be chairman of APNU, since he was only elected Leader of PNCR. Then when he became chairman of APNU they declared that he cannot become a parliamentarian, and when he became parliamentarian, they declared he cannot become Leader of the Opposition. One of them even approached the AFC seeking their support to be Leader of the Opposition so that the Leader of the PNCR would sit in parliament as a back bencher under him. Of course, the AFC refused.
They also campaigned that he should not be the Representative of the List, and with this they were successful because the current Representative of the List who has to voluntarily resign, and he did not. This created its own issues, reflected in part by MPs issuing personal statements on National Issues, for which the Party or the Leader of the Opposition had already issued a statement. This was just the tip of the iceberg.
The campaign on social media was relentless. In separate groups on Facebook and WhatsApp there were incessant vile and vitriolic attacks on Norton, as hundreds of silent group members observed. The members ranged from influencers, journalists, academics, opinion leaders, and even APNUAFC parliamentarians. The apparent objective was multifaceted. First it was to denigrate Norton and besmirch his character so as to make him ineffective as Party Leader. Then there was the hope of influencing the thinking of the group members, who would then use their platforms to regurgitate vile and vitriolic rhetoric and misleading information. Another apparent objective was to give the appearance of disunity, so that Norton could be blamed. While all this was happening, they withdrew from doing Party work, in the hope that the PNCR would get weak under Norton.
Local Government Elections were supposed to be Norton’s Waterloo. The plan was that the PNCR would have been so decimated that he would have been forced to resign. There was no thinking of what would happen to the PNCR members and supporters when the PPP take over everything. Some of these people even formed a political party and campaigned against the PNCR in Georgetown. Fortunately, PNCR supporters were not fooled.
Therefore, members of the Peoples National Congress Reform have the future and wellbeing of the Party in their hands. They will have to decide if people who rejected their decision, embarked on a two-year long campaign of deriding the Leader they elected, worked to undermine, and weaken the Party so they could seize control, and actively campaigned against the Party at local Government elections, should be rewarded. Rewarding this behavior would be the death kneel of the PNCR, since in the future every losing candidate would believe they would face no consequences if they worked to undermine and weaken the party so they could claim the person they want to remove has failed.
This situation is serious. At least one person in the group has stated she prefers the PPP to APNU led by Aubrey Norton. The irony is that she is the major sponsor of one of the candidates running against Aubrey Norton. How could a candidate accept sponsorship from someone who has openly stated that she has conditions about supporting the PNCR. Make it make sense. How would he know when she stopped working to have him elected, which is an exceedingly long shot, and start working to undermine the Aubrey Norton led PNCR?
In recent days there has been chatter on social media about PNCR unity. Every decision of the Party Leader is a reason for discord. He reshuffles his shadow cabinet, and it is an existential crisis, he determines composition of delegations to meet foreign dignitaries there is an upheaval. Irony is that all this is from people not actively doing party work or are not members of the Party. However, the claim of disunity was one of their platforms. The other was a weak and failed Party, but with success at LGE, and the PPP on the ropes due to PNCR Leader quiet but effective diplomacy, both locally and international, they cannot use this platform.
PNCR members must look out for those blaming the Leader for the apparent disunity, while attributing no responsibility to people who withdrew from the party, people who are working to weaken the Party, and people who are threatening to support the PPP if the candidate they are sponsoring is unsuccessful. When you see them blaming the Leader ask yourself, are they really interested in the long-term welfare and wellbeing of the Party?