What Pres. Irfaan Ali said and did, and where and how both were executed, disturbed so much that I am compelled to write about it again. The president is placed under the microscope again, and again he emerges spotted and flaked, muddied and a study of much that is wrong. Cash grant and his presentation before a largely drooling, brownnosing audience that would do anything to be seen and recognized by Pres. Ali as the right kind of people for his One Guyana farce.
There is another Guyana, which the president now pretends not to know exists. In two words, they are cash grant consumed Guyanese. Their hours and their days filled (cash grant). Their dreams and nightmares scorching (cash grant). Will they get one, and when will it be, regardless if a 100k, or 25k. They will take it, grasp at it with both hands. It is unbecoming, it is unstatesmanlike, to take cash grant anticipations and make that into comedy material. It is, I would go so far as to assert, inhuman, a shade barbaric. Too diabolically clever by half, when the pain that underpins the crying need for a cash grant is seemingly made into part of the presidential repertoire for the comedy circuit.
A president identifies with the plight of his country’s people. Their pain is his pain. He cares, he hears. He may even shed a few tears. It is manly. It is that genuine compassion of a leader who struggles alongside of suffering, dragging, citizens. Forgive the deep dive into the spiritual; I think it has much application. I nod in the direction of the circumstances where almost half of Guyana in this paradise discovered, and with so much liquid black gold lining its seas, hobbles, and fears what later in the day will bring. Not tomorrow, for that may be too late and too much to ask of them, but later in this day. In thinking of the apparent sloppy use that Pres. Ali made of the cash grant interest of Guyanese in full public view and amplified hearing, I wonder how much more contemptuous his postures may be in private of Guyanese whose only hope is a cash grant. It’s not unreasonable to think that it cannot be too positive, but resplendent in what is demeaning and humiliating to the needy in Guyana. If such a casual, cavalier, and comedic attitude, with words and ear-to-ear grins to match before a world of watchers and listeners, then why not in his private world, where the only ones absorbing his not-so-humorous escapades, would be his likeminded Palace Guard, and the mirrors that stare accusingly at him.
Embrace the people before elections for their hearts. Use the people of Guyana before elections for their votes. Then turn right around less than three months later, and drop a sledgehammer on their heads. His thinking may have been: I have them in my hands, so they are at my any whim and fancy. Toys for playing with, because they are available, weak. Balls to be kicked around, because they have no choice, can’t do any better. They are dependent on a cash grant, so they are dependent on me. Leader, decisionmaker, arbiter of maybe life and death, or the difference between grinding poverty and momentary prosperity. A cash grant of a hundred thousand dollars for some strapped Guyanese is almost like an inheritance of a hundred million dollars. Some citizens are that poor and so much in anguish. Too many citizens are in that bad of a position that a cash grant would be held by them to be the biggest winning lottery ticket.
Yet, in his unique form of leadership wisdom, Pres. Ali found all of this to be so frivolous and humorous that he took a dig at cash grant waiting Guyanese with what reeked of the ludicrous, if not the mischievous. A president is immunized from many matters while in office. It is something that should be scrapped in its entirety. No Pope should claim infallibility. No president should be granted immunity. On this searing and sickening cash development from the lips of Pres. Irfaan Ali, there shouldn’t be any immunity. The best thing that a responsible and suitably contrite (self-correcting) Pres. Ali could do is tender an apology to the Guyanese people. It doesn’t need to be heartfelt, which ought to be of some comfort to the master of the Guyanese realm. Be done with the cash grant comedy. Let there be only a tiny apology to restore the sanity of the poverty stricken in Guyana. And, of course, some money.
