Guyanese voters, in elections held Sept. 1, apparently ignored allegations of corruption that led to United States sanctions and they provided enough votes to the sanctioned person to make him the Leader of the Opposition in Parliament.

Azruddin Mohamed was embroiled in a gold-exporting scandal resulting in alleged underpayment of $50 million in tax revenues from October 2020 through August 2023. Last year, the Treasury Department froze the assets of Mohamed, his father and their businesses and a Guyana government official.

A defiant Mohamed, who has denied any wrongdoing, responded by forming the We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) political party just months before the election. He won 109,066 or 24.87 percent of the 718,715 votes cast, gaining 16 seats in the 65-member Parliament. The Partnership for National Unity (PNU) opposition party came third, with 77,998 or 17.9 percent of the votes and 12 seats. The governing People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) of incumbent President Irfan Ali won 242,498 or 55.3 percent of the votes, increasing its seats in Parliament from 33 – a one-seat majority – to 36.

However, only about 61.5 percent of voters cast ballots, down from 70 percent four years ago. It was not known at the time of writing which voters stayed home and whether that was a rebuff of Ali and the PPP/Civic by AfroGuyanese – descendants of formerly enslaved Africans — who comprise 33 percent of the population and have been complaining about being neglected and may have become disillusioned with the system.

Whatever the reason, the very weak performance of the PNU – successor to the People’s National Congress (PNC) which has usually been seen as the party of Afro-Guyanese – could be seen as strengthening the political power of the Indo-Guyanese community – descendants of formerly indentured Indians – which is just 4 percent larger, at 37 percent. And, unlike in the past, the key parliamentary positions will now be held by two Indo-Guyanese.

But the no-show voters could have been sending a message from both communities of dissatisfaction with how the huge windfall from the relatively new oil industry is being spent. The French news channel France 24 citied the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) as saying that 58 percent of Guyanese lived in poverty although the state budget has quadrupled to G$6.7 billion since 2019 when oil revenues started flowing. France 24 surprisingly referred to Ali as “center right,” though the PPP has traditionally been markedly leftist/socialist. He maintains that he is developing a mixed economy.

Ali would note that his government is pumping tens of millions of dollars into building and upgrading hospitals, roads, bridges, homes and schools and has made university education tuitionfree. The government is also giving every Guyanese citizen, living in the country or abroad, G$100,000 (US$480).

The centerpiece of the projects is likely Silica City, which the University of Miami is helping to design, located about 30 miles from the capital Georgetown. The first phase, involving construction of 110 houses, is already underway and there are reports that Silica City will eventually house 60,000 people. Ali has said that the project will be a hub for technology and other professionals. He told Americas Quarterly, “We are not building an energy nation. We are building a diversified economy that is focused on many areas of growth.”

One important outcome could be that Silica City could encourage the population – many of whom live in the floodprone coastal areas – to relocate inland. That would be a way to save on the large expenditure needed to build seawalls which has increased in response to climate change.

There have also been demands for the government to renegotiate the terms of the oil leases, which are clearly very favorable of the oil companies. The overall oil revenue for Guyana is about 14.5 percent of the value of the oil being pumped, according to some calculations.

Whatever it is, the government, as it entered the election, had a distinct advantage. Aubrey Norton, who heads the PNU and was Opposition Leader before the voting, seemed prescient when he told then U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken in July last year that he feared “a one-party state is emerging,” Americas Quarterly reported. Norton believed that, with the governing party having control of such massive financial resources from oil, it would be “almost impossible to defeat it in elections.’’ Ali has been pursuing an agenda of using oil wealth to transform the country of 83,000 square miles – the size of Idaho – with about 830,000 people, less than half that of Broward County or Miami-Dade County. But he has to ensure that the violent racial clashes of the past are not repeated. There is plenty to go around but it will not take much to arouse the divisive passions which the United States created and exploited to keep the nation’s first political leader, U.S.-educated dentist Dr. Cheddi Jagan, from being in power as British colonialism was ending in the early 1960s.

Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and their warmongering advisers nurtured implacable hostility towards Jagan, then the premier, insisting that he was a Marxist who would align the country after independence with the then Soviet bloc and set an unacceptable precedence during the Cold War.

Jagan, who always insisted to this writer that he was, instead, a “scientific socialist,” eventually fell victim to the machinations of the C.I.A., executed through the A.F.L.-C.I.O. labor organization. The result was racial unrest that eventually led to Jagan’s former ally, British-educated lawyer Forbes Burnham, and his then People’s National Congress (PNC) – rebranded the PNU – gaining power in a coalition with business interests under an electoral system designed to make it happen.

The Guyana story – only one of many in the 1950s and 1960s of U.S. action destabilizing several countries becoming “independent” – was told by historian Stephen G. Rabe in his 2005 book “U.S. Intervention in British Guiana – A Cold War Story.” He noted that the British, who did not share Kennedy and Johnson’s obsession with Jagan, still “interned” him and some colleagues and stationed troops in the colony to quell race riots that claimed hundreds of lives and destroyed millions of dollars’ worth of property.

The two racial groupings would not be reconciled after that, especially after the PNC, as several observers have insisted, rigged consecutive elections to stay in office. For two decades after that, Jagan and his PPP boycotted Parliament, effectively ensuring one-party rule.

Burnham ruled from 1964 to 1985, when he died of heart failure during throat surgery, and was succeeded by one of his senior ministers, Desmond Hoyte, also an Afro-Guyanese. At the urging of, ironically, another U.S. President, Jimmy Carter, Hoyte implemented electoral reforms and the change enabled Jagan to win the next election. He served as president from Oct. 9, 1992, to March 6, 1997, when he died, also from heart problems. Ironically, again, Jagan was flown for emergency care to the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C., in the country whose leaders once instigated violence to oust him from power. Jagan was succeeded by Sam Hinds – an Afro-Guyanese – then by Jagan’s American-born widow, Janet, followed by Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramoutar, both Indo-Guyanese, all from the PPP – rebranded PPP-Civic. That party was defeated by a coalition comprising the PNU and a newly formed Alliance for Change, headed by former PPP stalwart Moses Nagamootoo, an Indo-Guyanese, with David A. Granger, an Afro-Guyanese, as president.

The PPP defeated the PNU/AFC coalition in 2020 and Ali became president. His enhanced victory now apparently resulted also from fragmentation of opposition forces that resulted in six parties vying for votes. Two failed to gain any seat in Parliament and the third, the Forward Guyana Movement, won only one. The weak showing of the PNU – without its AFC partner – means that the Afro-Guyanese community’s voice in Parliament has been severely diminished and it remains to be seen how effective Norton will be in representing them.

Or it could be that Guyana has finally reached the point where it has shed its so-called apan jaat syndrome – voting for “our own.”