During his commissioning of the $6B Aubrey Barker Road in South Georgetown, President Irfaan Ali is reported as saying, ‘I am interested in seeing a People’s Progressive Party/Civic-led city council, …. I am interested in seeing strong government, strong leadership at the City Hall. So don’t guess what I’m saying… We want the chance to run this city because this city deserves better than what it has today’ (KN: 21/04/2026).
Not only Georgetown but Guyana deserves better than what is and has been taking place. For decades the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) government has been depriving the citizens of Georgetown, and Africans generally, of sufficient resources in order to force them to support it, but that effort has been a failure and so now, in relation to the city, the President has taken any guess work out of our understanding of why the city is in such a decrepit condition by clearly stating his party’s objective.
Like most autocrats, the PPP prides itself and seeks to sell its incumbency on the physical and the associated quantity of infrastructure it has been able to produce, although of course, almost anyone with sufficient resources should be able to accomplish this. But even its level of success appears limited: looks at the disaster that has resulted from the two largest projects the PPP regime has attempted to implement over its period in government: the Skeldon sugar project and the current the gas to energy project.
On of the softer and perhaps more important aspects of governance its failure is much more visible. Communism fell, Cheddi Jagan died and the PPP became transfixed on simply staying in government, some say as the self-designated protectors of Indian Guyanese. It lacks a cohesive ideology and its claim to have ushered in a return democracy in 1992 has at best stagnated. Three decades later Guyana remains in the same position: by far the most undemocratic country in the English-speaking Caribbean.
A few weeks ago, using the 2026 Liberal Democracy Index, I showed that Guyana is in a ‘grey zone’ at the bottom of the ‘electoral democracy’ category, between the latter and ‘electoral autocracy.’ Understanding the dynamics of modern autocratic governance is, therefore, vital if one is to address the challenges posed by regimes such as the PPP. Projecting themselves as strong men who are providing ‘strong’ instead of democratic leadership. Of course, this is just one of their usual tactics for subverting the rights of citizens to democratic self-governance.
Generally, ‘(d)democracy and autocracy were once seen as two separate and distinct worlds with little in common. … Now, however, autocrats across the globe, in poor and wealthy nations, in established and nascent democracies, and from the right and left, are using the same tactics to dismantle democracies from within. Rather than eradicating democratic institutions today’s autocrats corrupt the courts, sabotage elections and distort information to attain and remain in power.
They are elected through ostensibly free elections and connect with a public already primed to be fearful of a fabricated enemy. Critically, they use these democratic tools to attain power; once there, they dismantle those processes. Autocratic tactics creep into the political life of a country slowly and embed themselves deeply in the democratic apparatus they corrupt. Modern autocracy, one may say, is a tyranny of gaslighting’ (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/meet-the-new-autocrats-who-dismantle-democracies-from-within/).
Independent research has shown that modern autocrats uniformly apply key building blocks, all of which are present in Guyana, to cement their illiberal agenda and undermine democracy. These include unilaterally rewriting electoral laws and constitutions where possible, dividing the population into ‘us’ versus ‘them’ blocs and manipulating the legal system (The Tools of Autocracy Worldwide: Authoritarian Networks, the Façade of Democracy, and Neo-Repression. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00027642241267926).
Since the leaders of autocratic governments usually prioritise wealth and power, their ultimate enemy is democracy, both the ideas it is associated with—freedom, transparency, accountability, and justice—and the governments that support its spread. A core problem, however, for autocratic regimes is that the language of democracy will always be attractive to at a significant part of their population. Thus, to maintain control, they must seek to discredit the ideas that underlie democracy wherever they emerge.
Quite apart from their internal suppressive arrangements, a central feature of emerging autocrats is that they have a substantial array of transnational expert networks of professional propagandists, political strategists and lobbyists, legal specialists and intellectuals helping to disseminate their autocratic power-grabbing strategies worldwide. Ideology is no longer required for autocratic regimes to join forces; the lust for power and wealth and shared perception that democracy poses a grave threat to their ambitions is sufficient. Autocratic inter-state and expert networks embolden emerging autocrats worldwide, so one needs to pay more attention to what is taking place at the international level. This is particularly so as the government of Guyana has ‘political lobbyists’ in its employ.
In ‘Autocracy, Inc.’ (Doubleday, 2024), Anne Applebaum illuminates the important role international economic factors have contributed to the growing strength of dictatorships. For example, she emphasised the key role of kleptocratic financial institutions in buttressing autocratic rule by providing the autocratic leadership class with vast sources of illicit wealth. This system has created a web of autocracies linked together through corrupt practices that work to help prop up each other. It uses new digital technologies to survey citizens, spread propaganda, and carry out smear campaigns about their opponents. They go to great lengths to reinforce the messaging of the other autocracies because they believe the downfall of one member of the system poses a risk to the survival of the others.
Applebaum provides a road map of the strategies today’s democracies could pursue. First, she emphasizes the need to reframe the defence of democracy as a war against ‘autocratic behaviours’ rather than ‘autocratic regimes’. This places the focus on the specific tactics autocrats use that are harmful (e.g. a battle against corruption) and are likely to attract broader public support. Notwithstanding that vested interests will seek to prevent it, she claimed that a concerted effort to significantly reform the international financial system is a must. Implementing reforms to reduce transnational kleptocracy ‘is a critical first step for weakening the foundations of today’s leading autocratic regimes’.
Applebaum assesses that democracies should take their economic dependence on autocracies more seriously and engage in more meaningful efforts to loosen those linkages. She identifies key ways in which a wide range of private actors and institutions—many of which are based in democracies, including real estate agents, banks, and business owners—perpetuate autocratic rule by enabling or fostering kleptocracy. Democrats should also pursue a more concerted fight for ‘evidence-based conversations, such as by implementing laws that regulate social media to protect ordinary citizens and give them greater control and choice’.
She encourages scholars to avoid using the ‘Strong Men analytical category for it can be problematical when, for example, it becomes a floating signifier that reifies the democratic West versus the autocratic East binary and obscures autocrats’ weaknesses and inter-state ties to liberal democracies.’ Hopefully, it is viewed here as an anti-democratic category aimed at gaslighting the citizenry.
