By GHK Lall- When Excellency Ali plays his game of ‘divine authority’ being responsible for his government’s work, he is playing with fire. Since few Guyanese will tell the president to hold-off on going down that road, the heavy lifting is mine. Since neither the stalwarts in Office of the Presidency, nor even his vice presidents, nor his titular religious Cabinet juniors, will privately caution him to back-off from claiming ‘divine authority’, then that duty falls to me.
I’m appalled. Repelled isn’t word enough. For when I hear, Dr. Ali chanting with properly solemn face about the PPP Govt being graced with divine authority, recoiling in horror occurs. Surely, this man knows not what he sayeth. I place these thoughts of mine, these positions, before Guyanese, in their minds, at their feet.
For starters, does God Almighty, the true God, a real holy God approve of a government that’s corrupt through and through, with the exception of a scant few, only a few? Second, does God in his sacredness find favor in those who make maliciousness one of their chief characteristics, a leading practice? Third, does a merciful and benevolent God look kindly on a PPP Govt that prizes viciousness and vileness unimaginable, and untold? I do not know, nor pretend to know, what Mr. Ali thinks. However, when he goes out on the far limb of ‘divine authority’ guiding the work of the PPP Govt, he hangs shakily, by the thinnest thread.
Fourth, there’s a saying about patriotism. How men massage it for their own purposes, then shelter under it to conceal the worst objectives. Could ‘divine authority’ as now resonating across wet-and dry-corners of Guyana, be so cheapened, then sold to the gullible in this rancid manner? I don’t think that it was a figure of speech. Nor a slip of the tongue, a term that strayed.
Fifth, some Germans said it, then watched it grow globally. When someone starts down a certain road, there is only one choice left. Continue down that same self-destructive road. Regardless of what has to be said, what stops must be pulled out. In other words, tell one, begin small, and only that is known, that must be obeyed. The Germans, Master Race as they were (now monopolized by America) gave another one to the world that sticks to it feverishly. After long practice, a man starts to believe his own, shall I say, fabrications. His embroideries inspire him. Check this out.
I lead the way in thinking that Pres Ali’s feet-indeed, the sinews of his mind [or whatever those have withered to]-are now firmly, irremovably cemented on a Fantasy Island of his own manufacturing. Divine authority provides all the confirmation that Guyanese will ever need. I wonder what U.S. Ambassador Nicole D. Theriot and the EU’s Excellency Luca Antonini, and other likeminded diplomats in that industrious bunch, think about being dismissed to a lower tier, consigned to second chairs, in this rather extraordinary invocation of Guyana’s Pres Ali re divine authority.
If it were not for the energies, political keenness, of those two foreigners (one from In God We Trust country), then where would the PPP, Ali, and Guyana be? Should any claims have to be made about divine authority, then those two foreigners must stand first in line. Interests, exempted. Take foreign diplomats out of Guyana’s political equation, and PPP governance resides in several homes, perhaps all of them. Try this sampling. The devil’s workshop. Satanic rituals. The dens and damnations of the haram. Guyanese get to choose.
I leave on this somber note. When divine authority is brandished as being behind PPP governance, God is mocked. Is made into a lesser god. Is a false god. It requires exceptional irrationality to see divine authority in a government that misuses this nation’s patrimony to drive its many peoples deeper into poverty.
