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By GHK Lall
Two years and one month later, we are still living in the immediate aftermath of the bruising no-confidence and elections interval. It was of the raucous, the hocus-pocus, and left us with the obnoxious and vexatious. Post August 2, 2020, there was grand opportunity to rebound from the ashes and rebuild towards a dignified society. I admit to grave error.
President Ali made a wonderful start with words in his inaugural. Transparency. Unity. Accountability. Believing was my second grave error, a greater, more inexcusable one since some are simply not capable of anything but what is of the lush thickness of utter darkness. I submit that President Ali qualifies. He held the keys to doing those three things he swore to deliver, but which all fell apart under the influence of those nearest him, and his own farces, follies, fooleries. He is now clearly practiced in the porous and the perverse, through promises that appear sickly pale under any kind of cleansing light. He should have been his own man, but the other man would have none of it, and the official national leader liked it, especially when he came to a fuller realization of what the entirety of oil riches meant. He was willing, became a willing convert to what is so addictive and to what is destructive to Guyana. Words only paper over so much, his tongue is coated with what the building trade calls slurry.
Transparency he says exists. When the leader pronounces sharply about transparency, it is clear that what he engages in is nothing but the self-satisfying via self-advertisement. To even an indifferent listener, he comes across as someone who lacks the required enlightenment as to the real meaning of what genuine transparency encircles at its depths. If the President were an accountant, he would risk being banned for life: nothing adds up; his words fail to reconcile with reality. I help him: where there is transparency on anything, there is a blanket ban on secrecy, and dismissal of that other Trojan Horse named confidentiality. His people don’t have to makeup stories.
His Excellency swears that he is for unity, with this overripe banana called ‘One Guyana’ which proves it has neither backbone nor staying power when grasped too closely. Yet he denounces anyone for pointing to its shortness and nakedness, in that it covers only one segment of Guyana, one set of people primarily. His own works expose him: having tried hand with COVID cash nationally, it became the standard to continue but with a difference: only mainly his own people in sugar, farming, and fishing. Others in Guyana are ignored, insulted. This is ‘One Guyana’, this is the presidentially promised unity.
Never one pleased with moderation, the President spoke of delivering accountability. The President himself has had the dirty job of camouflaging in some manner, almost everything that is dirty. Here is a very short list: oil, sugar, gold, murders, police troubles, media management, felonies of financiers. And a host of stark truths that just would not go away, no matter how he wishes them away. If the leader were a barrister, disbarment would be hanging over his head for failure to represent clients effectively, per constitution and law. In all this, a single truth emerged. It was that Guyana’s President became intoxicated with the extravagant beauty of his own verbosity (at times his own pomposity too). As the presidency goes, so does a country; when there is this kind of toxicity in the presidency, then there can only be the angry in the citizenry.
President Ali had it all at his feet, all he had to do was govern, and he could have won over. Sadly, he settled for running over, through governance that was of settling scores, and not of healing the nation’s oozing, hurting sores. My God, how they hurt. But the president smells nothing, feels nothing. When his PPP Government senses a whiff of trouble from naysayers, troublemakers, and betrayers, there is no assessing of the problem, the approach relished is to take hammer to objectors. The Americans had the same problem with naysayer King, so they killed him. The Afrikaners had the same issue with Mandela, so they jailed him. When the British encountered likewise with Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Bose and the rest, they suppressed them. At the risk of touching a sensitive nerve, the sellers and hustlers, harried into flight a Prophet named Mohamed in Arabia. And in Galilee, the locals inflicted the Final Solution on a man at Golgotha. The President should familiarize himself with what real transparency, unity, and accountability are about. He may think Guyana is godly under his watch; it is Gomorrah. I tried.
I gave him the first year free; no learning resulted. The second, the ante was upped, and he snarled and lunged. People like us are not the enemy, Mr. President. Simply sojourners on the journey to true nationhood, towards that most elusive of universal goals, brotherhood. If there is no semblance of that, there can be no unity. No gangsters recruited, no police subverted, no media maneuvered, no ministers and mistaken fellow travelers deceiving in the self-enriching new world of capitalist Guyana can compel unity. Let me be of transparency on that one. President and PPP Government insist that all partake of the table of national fratricide. I, for one, shall not sup of the cup of national suicide. He says that dealing with Exxon is like dealing with a superpower. I enlighten my President on the steel of the human spirt, and its unconquerable will. And that is without warships and aircraft carriers, or lawyers, or commanders living in white houses.
A while back, the Americans kept Frankie “Mr. Gray” Carbo of Mafia lore in maximum at Alcatraz. The charge was “illegal management.” I recommend that same charge here for our governors, given the numbers rackets they run in the Guyanese moonshine, – budgets, infrastructure, contracts. The rackets and the racketeers proliferate and prosper. Listen and learn, please, Mr. President: this is not national governance; it is backroom party politics. A nation limps, languishes, is lost, Mr. President in two years of wastage.
