If party faithful doesn’t get support, they will go elsewhere – Aubrey Armstrong

Last Updated on Tuesday, 12 May 2026, 0:17 by Denis Chabrol

Former Central Executive member of the People’s National Congress (PNC), Dr Aubrey Armstrong says efforts must be made to assist party supporters or risk losing them.

“You have to take care of your people. You have to find ways of feeding them and so on. If not, you open the door for somebody else to poach them,” he remarked on Monday at the Hugh Desmond Hoyte commemorative lecture of that former President of Guyana and PNC-Reform leader.  In recent years, several senior and mid-level PNCR members have crossed over to the governing People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC).

Dr Armstrong made the point in referring to Mr Hoyte’s request for internal party experts to craft four policy papers, including one on access to credit and other financial products at equitable rates, shortly after the PNC lost the 1992 general and regional elections. The management strategist and consultant told the audience that Mr Hoyte had envisaged that access to credit would have allowed poor people, to get access to the banks and insurance companies “which have kept us out”. “We had a revolution already to get Blacks and Indians into the banks.”

“So the second thing he wanted to do, you have to take care of your people after you lose,” said Dr Armstrong, a former senior public servant during the PNC administration.

Turning his attention to features of leadership, he said they include receiving information, consulting and mobilising others to achieve objectives. In addition to intellectual intelligence, Dr Armstrong said leadership also requires emotional intelligence for people to reflect on themselves and “admit you’re wrong.”

Leadership is not only about intellectual intelligence  but emotional intelligence that allows for people to reflect on ourselves and “admit you’re wrong”. “Emotional intelligence says if we’re operating in an organisation, we have to find people with those skills. Some of them who don’t like you and some of them who you don’t like,” said Dr Armstrong in his lecture whose theme was “Strategic transformation from charismatic/hero-centered leadership: Some lessons from the leadership journey of Hugh Desmond Hoyte.”

Other major pillars of good leadership, he said, are making room for others to criticise their leaders, attract people with the right skills, manage and understand risks, problem solving and the ability to listen carefully, create room for others to criticise their leaders.

“You have to look for people who have the skills you don’t have so that your team reflects all of these skills,” Dr Armstrong said.

Specifically referring to Mr Hoyte, Dr Armstrong said Mr Hoyte was not threatened by those who were brighter than him. Instead, according to the consultant, the former Guyanese leader was very self-confident and broke barriers to the involvement of women and younger persons.  He also said that Mr Hoyte knew that he engage those two groups seriously and so he had take “tough” decisions to attract those who had certain skills.

Dr Armstrong said transformation requires “listening to the ground” analysing what is happening around oneself, analysing, planning and discussing what was was going on and then “mobilizing the key people who could make it happen.” “That is transformation. It’s an active thing,” he said.

He also credited Mr Hoyte, who served as Guyana’s second executive President from 1985 to 1992, as someone with the “iron will” to make decisions and stand by them. They included succession planning by bringing in new people into the party through the reform component. Similarly, Dr Armstrong praised Mr Hoyte for possesing “radical integrity, no tolerance for corruption.” “When you talk about integrity, you can’t talk bringing any money unless it was clear and no, no connection to crime. In fact, he would have blown up if he had a sense that you had talked about a project down the road,” he also said.

While on a visit to a party group activity organised by South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), he said Mr Hoyte had recognised its financial independence from the headquarters in running their own affairs. “He began to understand the need for us to strengthen party groups. And they will talk back to you. When you strengthen them, they will talk back to you.”

Dr Armstrong said party groups could not be kept weak or they would remain so throughout the struggle.

Mr Hoyte died at the age of 73 on December 22, 2002. He assumed the presidency after his predecessor and Guyana’s first executive president died on August 6,1985. Mr Hoyte retained office at the 1985 general elections that international observers had regarded as rigged as “crooked as barbed wire”. After conceding to local and international demands for electoral reform, he led the PNC into electoral defeat in 1992 until 2015 when it returned to power under the umbrella of A Partnership for National Unity in coalition with the Alliance For Change. That coalition lost the 2020 elections and in 2025, the PNCR-led APNU was relegated to the second largest opposition party in parliament.