Pres. Ali: from where “free and fair” (and how)?

It took a while, but Pres. Irfaan Ali has forced me to an unhappy place.  My president lives in a make-believe world.  He made it.  He believes it.  And straight from the first Biblical book, Genesis, he examines his handwork and sees this make-believe world he has created as being very good.  From Guyana’s president came what projects unto the world stage.  It’s the ongoing story of Guyana’s national circus.  A president in top gear, who barrels over facts on the ground to deliver his self-made facts.  Guyana’s elections of 2025 were “free and fair.”  I think of a mind that denies, and the thought comes of Guyana’s president.  There stands one who rushes blissfully past sobering reality.  One given to hallucinations and pontifications.  Has Pres. Ali lost it?  He can’t be that out to sea, so out of touch with elections 2025, to end up at “free and fair.”  Then again, he has manifested a marked propensity to ignore irritants, inconveniences, whatever challenges Guyana’s so-called democracy.  Wherever the orbit His Excellency travels, astronauts and astrologists race to avoid.

The 2025 elections were peaceful, almost uneventful.  But anyone that calls them free and fair is lost in his own bubble.  Such has never been a concern for Pres. Ali.  The bigger the bubble, the more room he has to stand before a nation, international observers, the world, and layout what even the unlettered in the rustic village would studiously resist to avoid descending lower.  Not being one to be restrained by reason, free and fair were seen as needing a boost by the president, so he took off like a jumbo rocket for some sort of space travel.  Alongside “free and fair” for the elections, he proudly squeezed in “beyond a shadow of doubt.”  I congratulate Pres. Ali for being this peerless pioneering spirit soaring to new heights, planting his flag there.  On what wings of facts, on what turbocharged set of circumstances, did Excellency Ali fly to arrive at “beyond a shadow of doubt?  When “free and fair” were themselves seriously doubted by principled observers, there’s the president’s dogmatic insistence on stamping “beyond a shadow of doubt” on the September elections.  It’s obvious, Pres. Ali has carved out an alternate universe for himself, for there are facts that speak their own unique language.  Not the one he speaks.

I speak not of Azruddin Mohamed the political candidate and he and his party’s travails.  I speak of President Mohamed Ali, who hurts himself when against the fullness of facts, against the grim record extracted from raw reality, he persists with this fable of free and fair, and without doubt.  I wonder where the sturdiness of his mind has fled.  If not that, then the strength of his relationship to basic facts.  I have read about those who are strangers to truth, but that’s too mild for the issue under scrutiny.  For what is now unfolding re Guyana’s 2025 elections points of distancing as far as possible from facts when faced with it.  I expect this kind of representation from a man living in a delirium, either from the ravages of pedigree, chemistry or the publican’s nectars.  This should not be, never come to mind, when the facts of Guyana’s 2025 elections are so overwhelming.  Peaceful, for sure, on Monday, September 1st; but Guyana’s elections cannot be confined to a single 12-hour day.

For those who have use for facts, place a much higher premium on such than Excellency Ali, reference is made to one instance encountered by Team Mohamed.  A busload of ordinary Guyanese men and women is unloaded in the middle of nowhere, and Pres. Ali sets his face: there’s no doubt, there was fairness displayed in exemplary fashion.  Just like census results held hostage, to the PPP’s advantage.  The president can pretend to be unseeing of the bias and unhearing of the streams of PPP propaganda (state media), but whatever else he may be, Irfaan Ali is not unconscious.  Most regretfully, I observe a leader who doesn’t care how he makes himself into a figure of disbelief.  I have heard others say at different times, ‘what planet did so-and-so come from’ which has its relevance.  In Pres. Ali’s case, I ask: what special purgatory did he design for himself, took up residence inside, exist with these torments?

To close out on a flattering note, I have read Alice in Wonderland.  Today, what citizens live with is Irfaan Ali the Magnificent in mindboggling flights of fantasy.  Free and fair stand as an extraordinary moment of denial, of patented leadership folly.