President Ali on Al-Jazeera

Nov 06, 2022 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – I was encouraged that His Excellency, President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali made it to the big time with an appearance on Al-Jazeera. On listening to what he articulated, and how he did, I had to hang my head in shame. The President blew the big moment, and came across as a man parroting word for word what the American interviewer put before him as questions. On two occasions, I heard my President, who is so sweet in reading from sweeter scripts when in Guyana, unable to speak with words of his own and repeating verbatim a long string of what was conveniently extended for him to nibble. President Ali did not just nibble what was dangled before him, he swallowed. I cringed.

President Ali had to know that, at the very least, he had a captive Middle East audience. When the Middle East comes up, it is usually in the context of oil first and always. The kings and princes and presidents and prime ministers (and Emirs and Sultans) know all that there is to know about oil. From the dark and draining side, when the Western powers, the Anglo-Saxons of America and Great Britain robbed them blind, and patted them on the head to reassure that they were and are the best friends that the Bedouins and other Arabs, plus the Persians, would ever have. From Twitchell to Trump, from Churchill to Blair, and from Rockefeller to Reagan they all lied, while they cheated the Middle Easterners and filled up their banks and ensured their people prospered.

My point is that President Ali had a glorious opportunity on Al-Jazeera to skewer Exxon before a friendly audience that knows what it is to be haemorrhaged and drained by predatory Western oil companies. Instead of Guyana’s President Ali emphasizing to his foreign questioner that Guyana has been victimized and pulverized through a vile 2016 oil contract, the only thing that he could utter about oil was what the interviewer put into his mouth. What Exxon did to Guyana under the PNC was what its forefather SOCAL did to Saudi Arabia. Just like how Michael Pompeo raced to over here, similarly President Roosevelt made his way to the Saudis and did business with King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud in the name of American oil companies. Unlike Guyana, the nomadic Arabs were sensitive to their courtship, and how they were not getting what was their due. We were awed by the visiting Pompeo and our own new sense of importance but the Saudis were too savvy about what their deserts held, and still they got robbed.

If our own President Ali had any clue about what Guyana’s oil means and what he should get from it, at the barest minimum, he would not be so friendly with the likes of Lynch and Routledge. He would not have a Vice President like the one he has, who is more Exxon than Darren Woods himself. He would not have an EPA that is a billboard for a diseased and paralyzed State institution. He would not have had the thought nor the space nor the instinct to suppress oil to a secondary part of the Al-Jazeera conversation, but seized the opening to slam the rapacity and injustices of Exxon in Guyana. The sympathy factor would have been incalculable, and with the rise and march of OPEC+, and the implications, Guyana’s 26,000 plus kilometers Stabroek Block represents an oil card that can’t be bettered.

Instead, Guyana’s President Ali prioritized speaking about eco-tourism and agriculture. Those are good things in themselves, but a poor third cousin, two stepchildren, to oil. If the clever President intended to indicate a vision of economic diversification, he did not do himself, or Guyana, any honours. For, there he was speaking about accelerated oil production in one breath, while cutely inserting doing so “responsibly” in the next. Given Guyana’s still developing capacity, and Exxon’s known practice of negligence (and cover-ups), accelerated production and responsibly do not belong in the same sentence or conversation.

I think that President Ali’s Al-Jazeera moment was a spectacle about ineptitude and the wrong attitude. He had his audience, he missed both cue and moment.

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