Listen to Pres Ali. Absorb his TV spots. Then try linking leadership to what he has become; what he has allowed to dominate him; what he relishes. I point to oil.
‘Guyana got the wrong end of the stick.’ If a guess was made about the author of that statement that possessed considerable resonance, and Excellency Ali’s name featured, there’s nothing closer to the fact. But there was Pres Ali taking a tamer, lower, duller, approach on CNN. The Exxon contract ‘is not the best contract….’ There was a time when the national leader of one of the most watched and written about countries in the world was in a full toothed snarl on the Exxon contract (wrong end of the stick). Only for him now to dim, peter out, and fall apart to the toothless (not the best contract).
This is how the courage and bullishness of leading is abandoned. It is how hedging is embraced. Don’t say anything, don’t do anything, don’t let any slip, any loose posture, upset Exxon and its protectors in Washington. Being a leader and fighter for what is right and fair to being a hedger, a shifter, and a marketer for what is weak and pathetic (not the best). Before a worldwide audience hanging on every word that can be had about Guyana and its oil, there was Guyana’s leader. A happy hedger, a minimizer, and a hairsplitter. From attacking with fire in the eye (the wrong end of the stick) to bending over backwards and walking backwards in frightened retreat: the Exxon contract is not the best.
It was the work of a previous government (the PNC). True. It was inherited by the PPP Govt. True. It is ‘not the best.’ Wrong. Because that doesn’t come near. Weak. Because it is too careful. Too fearful. Too much of an earful of what the mandarins in Exxon and the top of the US government find acceptable. Last, it is woeful. Because it disembowels Guyana’s president before the world. From the wrong end of the stick, Pres Ali had a great opportunity to tell the world what the Guyanese people think and live with: an Exxon oil contract that is probably the worst in the world of oil.
Times change. Men change more. Men placed in leadership positions and faced with the call of courage change the most. For the worst. When Dr. Ali took the reins of power, he was as aggressive as a championship caliber boxer in the first round of a title fight. But when he sensed the first jab coming, he raced back to the shelter of his corner. Sanctity of contract. A leader abandoning fighting for pride, for the people who put him where he is. A leader now taking comfort in hedging. Even manifesting some skill in marketing. ‘It’s not the best contract.’ If it is not the best, then it is not so bad. Hedging. Could be adopted as a good contract. It’s just not the best. More hedging. With a sly pinch of presidential marketing for the Exxon contract.
But the Exxon contract qualifies as far from the best, among the worst. Pres Ali knows it. His own learned (onetime patriotic Guyanese) comrades in the PPP Govt have mocked it, denounced it, as a tragedy and the crime of the century. I think the Exxon contract is the frontrunner for crime of the millennium recognition. But there was Pres Ali engaged in slithering and sidestepping before CNN’s global audience: not the best…. If that is the best that Mistah Irfaan Ali can muster, all the courage that he is capable of, he just crossed a point of no return, no competition: Guyana’s worst president ever. It is well earned. Congratulations, Dr. President. When leadership in all of its formidable, resourceful, elements is abandoned, then Guyana is no longer a country. Because when national leadership is solely focused on hedging, Guyana is an unfolding crisis that’s deepening. And drowning the hapless Guyanese people.
