Frontally: Prime Minister Phillips disappointed. A soldier yielding ground. Weakly. Unnecessarily. Pitifully. A leader who abandoned a vantage point that was his to hold. He let go. For what reward? What honor? Prime Minister Mark Phillips was a general. No general should descend to the level of stockade deodorizer. A general is a bold leader, not a mindless follower. In this compulsory postmortem of PM Philips post the MV Barima tsunami, I try to be delicate, considerate. Too many tears already flow in this brutalized Guyana.
I seek not to bury Mark Anthony Phillips. I seek ways to glaze him, praise him, to raise him. But how can I, when he flooded the consciousness of Guyanese with that one dreadful, painful, word. Noise. Noise, Mr. PM? When people are blinded by emotion. When they see red embers of danger and death lurking in every condition, every cranny. Their rage roars. They rise to their fullest height; ready to fight any slight. An army general of caliber should recognize a mutiny on his hands. Mr. Phillips may have been the best general Guyana had at one time. Show Guyanese that general is still alive, stirring, has something left in him. Not to NOISE! A former general should never stoop to a lackey’s level: ready for any dirty job. I believe that former general, present Prime Minister Phillips still has it in him not to hear noise. But to know how to defuse a volatile situation. He should also know how he is being used (because of who he is), and draw a line. This will be the new way. A standard set for president, second vice president, others (whatever their virtue, their vision.
He doesn’t hear “noise.” No such word drips past his lips. What he heard, should have sensed, were the deep-seated wraths of Guyanese who have had it with the PPP Govt. In the gut! In the eyeballs. The man of war transforms into a peacemaker. The prime minister attiring himself in princely respect. If there was one man who could have put a stop to one kind of Guyanese called to do work that Untouchables wouldn’t touch, it was Mark Phillips. When all he heard in the post MV Barima cascading series of catastrophic failures was “noise” and was unbecoming enough to regurgitate it, he pitched headlong into ignominy.
He laid to waste a rare opening. All he had to try, to put before the enraged, was this. ‘We are all hurting. We are all bent double by loss unknown and unimaginable. By pain unlike before and unbearable. I appeal for the best that’s within all of us. Help me to deal with this disaster, this tragedy. Let us stand shoulder-to-shoulder in this hour of supreme national trial. Let us ready to bury our dead unified and dignified. Let’s comfort our brothers and sisters with newly discovered sublime beauty of the spirit. There’ll be time enough later for revisiting and rebuking. For honest listening and authentic understanding.’ How spellbinding Mark Anthony Phillips could have been. Not in the manner of the powerful politician he is. Or overbearing as he could be. Overwrought as he was. But as man of the people rising to majesty’s peaks. When the people were unhappy. Driven to frenzies of fury. He didn’t. It is Mark Phillips’ loss; a gem of a moment squandered for the cheap (noise). For depravity’s routine (noise). For politics gone obscene (noise). Should a man, a general, a prime minister, comport himself with flaring aggression, however it’s believed justified, when an impenetrable pall of grief suffocates, reduces to tears? I think not. These discoveries came in this post MV Barima postmortem of Prime Minister Phillips.
I’d be of zero utility to PM Phillips, his political brothers, if I tell him what pleases his ear. Not piercing, bludgeoning bars of noise that the circumstances demand. But some make-believe symphony of insipidity. At ease, mon general. At ease! Not I, sire!
