Dear Editor,
I give a structured political analysis of what I characterise as the targeted political persecution of Azruddin Mohamed, a persecution operating on two simultaneous and mutually reinforcing fronts. The first is the weaponisation of state administrative power through the revocation of gun licences. The second is the entrenchment of ethnic and ideological dominance within Guyana’s Cabinet, which systematically excludes meaningful opposition representation. Together, these two instruments constitute a coherent strategy of political suppression, one that carries grave implications not only for the LOO, but for Guyanese democracy in the lead-up to 2030.
The revocation of personal gun licences issued to the Mohamed duo — licences granted as standard security provisions for persons of their public standing — was not an administrative decision. It was a political one. The mechanism by which such licences may be revoked is, in substance, uncomplicated: a Cabinet directive, followed by the Commissioner of Police’s compliance, is sufficient to strip a citizen of a lawfully held instrument of self-protection. No judicial order is required. No independent review is mandated. The state acts, and the citizen must respond.
That simplicity of mechanism is precisely what makes it so effective as a political tool. It carries the formal appearance of administrative routine while functioning as a message — unmistakable to those who receive it and deniable to those who observe it from a distance.
The question that must be confronted is this: why the Mohameds, and why now? The answer requires no elaborate inference. Azruddin Mohamed occupies a prominent position as Leader of the Opposition — a role that, in any functioning democracy, is not merely tolerated but constitutionally protected. The Opposition is not the enemy of the state; it is a structural feature of democratic governance, designed precisely to check the excesses of the party in power.
When the instruments of the state are directed — selectively and deliberately — against the individual who leads that Opposition, the action transcends administrative discretion. It becomes persecution. The revocation of the gun licences did not emerge from a generalised policy review. It emerged in a context of political tension, and it was applied to political targets. Context is not incidental to meaning; context is meaning.
Beyond its immediate impact on the Mohameds, the licence revocation functions as a signal to others — to political figures, to civil society actors, to anyone who might consider meaningful opposition to the government. The message is as old as political power itself: align, or be made vulnerable. This is the architecture of intimidation, and it does not require overt violence to be effective. The withdrawal of security provisions from a public figure in a country where political violence is not unknown is not a neutral administrative act. It is a threat, rendered in bureaucratic language.
The second prong of this persecution is less visible than a licence revocation — and therefore more dangerous. It operates not through a single directive but through the accumulated weight of appointments, through the slow construction of a Cabinet that reflects not the diversity of Guyana’s population but the demographic and ideological preferences of the governing party.
The current Cabinet composition reveals a stark arithmetic: approximately 73% of Cabinet members belong to non-African-Guyanese ethnic backgrounds. Put more plainly — for every four Cabinet ministers, three are non-African. This is not demographic representation; it is demographic replacement of one community’s political voice by another’s. The governing principle appears to be dominance, not inclusion.
One might respond that Afro-Guyanese ministers do exist within Cabinet — and this is true. Afro Ministers: Mark, Hugh, Kwame, Oneidge, and Juan – a presence, examined closely, reveals the second dimension of structural exclusion: unanimous assent functionary. They are visible but not powerful; present but not independent. A community’s representation is not secured by placing its members in rooms where they are expected to agree with every decision made before they arrived.
This pattern is a well-documented instrument of managed pluralism. It provides the governing party with the optics of diversity while maintaining the substance of control.
The Cabinet’s composition extends beyond ethnic arithmetic into ideological character. More than half of the Cabinet consists of individuals of Hindu persuasion— a fact that is not, in itself, problematic. What is problematic is the downstream consequence: a Cabinet structured around Hindu ideological dominance will, whether intentionally or by institutional gravity, propagate Hindu ideological frameworks at the expense of all others. The question that must be asked — and answered — is this: do communities outside that ideological tradition receive genuine representation in the decisions that govern their lives between 2026 and 2027?
The answer, on present evidence, is no. And that absence of representation is not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a political choice.
The genius of a two-pronged strategy is that each prong legitimises and amplifies the other. The gun licence revocation targets the Mohamed family directly, signalling to individual opponents that the state’s administrative apparatus is available for deployment against them. The Cabinet’s ethnic and ideological composition sends a broader structural message: that the levers of collective governance have been captured, that the institutions meant to check power have been filled with those who will not check it.
Together, they create an environment in which political opposition is simultaneously unsafe at the individual level and structurally futile at the institutional level. This is not democracy. This is the architecture of soft authoritarianism — authoritarianism that wears constitutional dress while hollowing out constitutional substance.
Guyana has watched this pattern before: across the Courantyne River, in the Dési’s Suriname decades. The comparison is instructive, not because the situations are identical, but because the early conditions of democratic erosion share a family resemblance: the marginalisation of opposition voices, the capture of institutions, the normalisation of administrative persecution. Suriname’s people eventually reclaimed their democracy through the ballot.
Political persecutions do not resolve themselves quietly. They accumulate. Every licence revoked, every community voice excluded, every ministry decision that reflects the priorities of one ethnic or ideological group rather than the nation’s plurality — these are deposits in an account of grievance that will be drawn upon, with interest, at the polls.
The 2030 general elections are not distant. Every political actor in Guyana is already, consciously or not, navigating. One man nearing 100 still tries his style of navigating in the letter writer’s column. The government that believes it can suppress opposition through administrative harassment and structural exclusion, and emerge from that election unscathed, misreads Guyanese’s memory and patience.
Santokhi’s fate in Suriname is the cautionary tale, having repaired his finances competently yet voted out by a people who felt invisible. Competence without inclusion is not a governing philosophy; it is an expiration date. The ballot — when it finally comes — remembers everything.
All political actors — government and opposition alike — play their parts on a stage that belongs to the people. The Mohameds’ persecution, whether pursued through gun licence revocations or through the structural silencing achieved by an exclusionary Cabinet, is not merely an injustice to one family. It is a statement about what kind of country Guyana intends to be.
Democracy’s institutions do not maintain themselves. They depend on those in power choosing restraint over retaliation. A licence revoked for politics, a Cabinet built for compliance, an Opposition targeted by the administration it is meant to check — these are not the signs of a system working. They are the signs of a system being quietly dismantled from within.
Someone must stand between the document and the deed. Between the promise of constitutional protection and its betrayal. Between power and the people whom power is always tempted to forget. That is what lawyers do. That is what an independent press does. That is what a genuine Opposition does.
The curtain has not fallen on Guyana’s democratic experiment. But it is being tugged — steadily, deliberately, from both sides at once. The people of Guyana, and all who stand with them, must take hold of it before it drops.