By Gtimes

Copyright guyanatimesgy

Reeling from the body blows and uppercuts delivered on Sept 1st, Aubrey Norton was forced to throw in the towel – after his claim of receiving some low blows was rejected!! “No mas! No mas,” he finally cried: he wasn’t going back to parliament, but stay on as leader of the PNC. Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” – their classic meditation on calling it quits came to your Eyewitness’ mind: “In the clearing stands a boxer/ And a fighter by his trade/ And he carries the reminders/ Of every glove that laid him down/ Or cut him ’til he cried out/ In his anger and his shame/ “I am leaving, I am leaving”/ But the fighter still remains.” Norton’s face displays his “reminders”!!
He’s been in the PNC his entire his entire life – starting in the YSM of Burnham, who insisted he’d “mould the nation” starting with the youths who he dragooned into all sorts of organisations for them. Paul Simon again: “I am just a poor boy/ Though my story’s seldom told/ I have squandered my resistance/ For a pocket full of mumbles// Such are promises/ All lies and jests/ Still a man hears what he wants to hear/ And disregards the rest.”
He believed in Burnham’s lies, not realizing he was just a Pied Piper leading a whole generation to their doom. As he agonized the path ahead, Norton plaintively echoed Burnham’s Biblical plea to his supporters when HE’d faced a dark defeat back in the day. It was Jesus’s chiding of Peter after he found his disciples asleep: “Would ye not watch with me one hour?” Your Eyewitness wonders who was gonna be Norton’s Peter since Burnham had Ptolemy Reid as the rock on which the PNC would be reinvigorated.
Looking back, Noron reflected on the PNC’s electoral history and the stumbling blocks of new parties erupting: “In the 1957 elections, we did well. Then, in the 1961 elections, the United Force emerged as a new party, and we lost seats to them. In 2006, the AFC came as a new party, and we lost seats to them again. In 2025, WIN came as a new party, and we lost seats to them.” In 2025, of course, PNC didn’t just “lose” seats to WIN, but actually for the first time in the PNC’s history it bled so many seats it ain’t even the SECOND largest party in the country. The PNC under his watch had become an “also ran”!!
Norton concluded that the PNC would need to understand “the phenomenon of why, when new parties emerge, our support base seems to go in another direction.”
He must focus on the role of the shepherd in the flock straying!!
…a stalwart’s departure
We know that after he took over the helm of the PNC in 2021, Norton faced a seemingly endless stream of executives departing – most to his arch-enemy the PPP!! And they were of all races, classes and strata as Burnham would say!! Your Eyewitness had assumed Norton woulda been introspecting since then. And this would’ve been reflected in the twelve disciples….erm…MP’s…he selected to spread the (PNC) gospel to the equivalent of Galilee and Samaria in Guyana!!
But when he bypassed quite a number of PNC stalwarts for the likes of the racist rabble rouser David Hinds, he should’ve expected a blowback. It just came in the most public resignation by Mervyn Williams – an Indigenous-Guyanese 40-year PNC veteran from the PNCR’s Central Executive – on the PNC’ s program “Nation Wach”!! He’d just interviewed newbie MP, Chicken Man Terrence Campbell, who Norton had appointed Parliamentary leader – even though not even a PNC member!!
Was that the straw that broke the stalwart’s back afer asking himself “Wha’ happen? Goat bite me”???

…the CPL finals
Well, once again, our Guyana Amazon Warriors have qualified for the playoffs!! OK,,,you might be saying that’s expected since they’re done so more than any other team!! But this year it’s all the way!!