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I have long said that Guyana’s President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali should have been an actor. He is a man who has never seen a performance that did not appeal to his crude sense of politics and aesthetics. I present several instances where the president’s acting should have been worthy of an academy award, only for him to fall back to earth with a thud. The bottom line: a dud actor, a sham performer, if ever there was one.
It was four Augusts ago that the newly minted President Ali swept into the National Cultural Center on a caravan and soared to the rafters. Rhetorical lightning that was streaked here and there with the transcendent. From Kipling to a smattering of the Koran (if I remember well) graced the momentous occasion. I thought that I saw and heard the beginnings, the raw materials, of a true statesman. So did more than a few others, local and foreign, packed into the Cultural Center confines.
The euphoria was short-lived, ominous reality replaced what was thereafter recognized as hallucinatory. It was because President Ali gave Guyana and the rest of the world their first glimpse of his operatic and phantomlike side. Here was a leader who likes to glide and slide. All the fulsome and fanciful words that could have meant so much to the people of this country, if only he was half serious. Except that before an eyelid could be batted, the president went from flashing statesman to crashing comet. It is that ancient lament: what could have been….
The same man, the same Excellency Ali who flared so sweetly about walking with kings and then possessing the simple grandeur to rub shoulders with peasants, and make them feel at home, had changed overnight into a figure of impatience, hostility, and grating abrasiveness. The only peasants that have any standing before him these days are those that are feathered, fly in the air, and decorate many a lampstand in high houses. That population of winged beasts is spelled pheasants and are for ornamental purposes only. It was the first indication of the phantom of the opera presidential standard and style with which Guyanese now glumly exist.
Then there was what qualified as a national spectacle. The president swaggering and throwing his weight around as though he is some medieval battlefield warrior. Yet there he was in a small circle around a smaller table with senior locals and ranking foreigners, and he was reduced to a stenographer. Everybody talking and pontificating convincingly, but Guyana’s president was consigned to the role of writing minutes.
In public, a man brandishing the verbal daggers of a fighter, in private, just another nonentity forced into the role of scribbler. Who is the top dog in this country? The man who was elected to do so, or the man who selected him to be just the way that he is. Indebted and impotent. Loud and louder still before a crowd, but a presence of limited to no importance behind closed doors. It was and is the Guyana presidential phantom opera showing for the second time.
Next, President takes great care, goes out of his way, to come across as serious, sober, mature, and a leader of standing, when dealing with foreigners. As a Guyanese, I say that that is good, and it is what must grace the president’s manner when dealing with his own people, especially those who do not agree with him. A man of reason and openness he must be. Yet all the worldly trappings, which the president is smart enough to manifest before strangers and outsiders, he abandons without a second thought, when it is his duty to face frankly and with equanimity whatever is his lot on the domestic scene. Instead of cool control, President Ali becomes an out-of-control typhoon.
Instead of patience becoming the connection between a leader and citizens, there is a rank display of truculence and all too often petulance. Taken in aggregate, Guyanese are now appalled to absorb their dawning reality of a leader from whose pores the first sweats of a blustery and haughty tyranny seep out. It stains the environment and his record. Rather than a president feeling his way for an answer grounded in logic and substance, there is this distorted countenance of someone fitted for a fight to throttle whoever dared to stand in his way. A leader trying his best, or an abuser at his worst. is the tricky proposition that I leave in the lap of my fellow citizens.
Last, a now inseparable and conspicuous feature of President Ali operatic presentations is how he reacts to criticism. He sticks with a good game pretending that he does understand the criticisms. But attacks the well-meaning, patriotic critics. He rails against ‘experts’ and self-appointed ‘scholars’ and others of that damned battalion of Guyanese who call the government and its leaders, including the president, to account for their actions that do not add up. It is how he fosters an us-against them mentality among his own hardy rabble. Instead of facing the facts and circumstances that confirm the lack of transparency and accountability in PPP Guyana, the president prefers to swamp with an avalanche of exaggeration that embarrasses even some of his own most diehard loyalists.
‘None has been as transparent; none has been as accountable’ takes pride of place in a jester’s book of jokes. The problem is that President Ali has convinced himself that his wide world of fantasy is enveloped in Guyanese reality. He attacks with the puny, defends with what is to be pitied. Aman consumed by his acting skills is President Ali. A leader who revels n the role of phantom and leading performer in Guyana’s political theater, one now switching from role to role effortlessly.
