H@rd Truths By GHK Lall – A timely message for the US Ambassador

Mar 15, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I take the liberty today of sharing this humble and respectful communication with my fellow American, Her Excellency, Sarah Ann Lynch, US Ambassador to Guyana.

Excellency: what was sowed in 2019-2020 was always a whirlwind in waiting.  Daily, it draws nearer, more menacingly.

During a tempestuous time in Guyana, Ambassador Lynch was more in Guyana’s political wars than Guyanese themselves.  The Ambassador shuttled back and forth, and hovered all over, in efforts to put together a local political plank that embraced American interests and visions.  The result was the humpty-dumpty of the PPP into national office.  As an American, I yield to her dogged handiwork in honor of democracy, and free and fair.  Thanks, Excellency.  The problem is that as a Guyanese, there are these concerns about what democracy has turned out to be under the PPP of President Ali and the other president (the real one).

I am sorry Excellency, but democracy has been nothing but what favors American prosperity, the calculations of likely American geopolitical visions.  Excellency, the result is that democracy under the PPP has mutated into a fearsome Frankenstein laboratory of endless mischief and leadership malfeasances intensifying daily, now rotting before the nostrils of Guyanese.  Consuming anger flickers, flashes, and flares.  For what America and the Ambassador said was fair is now laced with fear.  It is the fear of some about nothing from their oil.  They also own it.  But now there is the fear (and circumstances) of dismissal to second-class citizenship, nothing but intolerable outcasts.  Intolerance spawns more intolerance.  Ambassador Lynch knows that more than I can tell.

On the surface, at least to naïve, gullible, and green Guyanese, Her Excellency’s toils and embarrassing (to me) overtures were for the benefit of Guyanese.  Thoughtless Guyanese pretended at more partisan daftness in conveniently forgetting those two American oil companies plunked down, like US gunboats, in Guyana’s oil waters.  Guyanese lacked the foresight to envision American and European hordes rushing across our open skies: Schlumberger, Baker Hughes, American Airlines, more recently CH4/LindsayCa, and countless others drooling over Guyana’s prospects.

For the unlearned in Guyana, that in a nutshell is the democracy and diplomacy of America and its ambassadorial field general, Sarah Ann Lynch.  Corporate democracy, or Wall Street-style democracy, or oil democracy but now today’s democracy in Guyana.  This was why tireless Ambassador Lynch did the unthinkable: she went to the Vice President, once regarded by ABC&E as a politician of monstrous proportions.  Cheddi Jagan as Opposition Leader couldn’t get a US visa, but his nobler descendant was pivotal enough to get an ambassadorial visit and audience in his tarantula’s den.  Thanks to American Ambassador Lynch’s groundwork, Guyanese get stung and bitten by many toxic political tarantulas.  Remember: free distorted into farces, fair transforming to fear.

What would be fair, and exemplary of America the free, is for Her Excellency to break similar ground as she did with the then Opposition Leader (now omnipotent VP), and soil her diplomatic hands with not politics, but business this time.  If Ambassador Lynch could have gone to the lengths she did, and done the unprecedented and unmentionable in 2019-20 in Guyana’s political affairs, then she should and must do the same in the oil business of Guyana.  The oil business of Guyana is not the lameness of matters best left to be hammered out between competent private parties.  No, Madam Ambassador; hell no! My fellow American.  This is too huge, too lopsided, too crucial to be left to the hands of the PPP, PNC, Messrs. Darren Woods and Alistair Routledge.  Americans should remember Reza Pahlavi and what ensued.

People are wrathful here.  One Guyanese plunged into stormy waters: Joint Services.  And it is all interwoven with oil patrimony, American style democracy, and Guyana’s one-sided prosperity.  It tangles with the same inclusivity of which Ambassador Lynch used to speak fairly frequently, but which has since fled her vocabulary; or abandoned as untimely and unseeming.  Her intelligence sources should inform Ambassador Lynch that Guyana is a powder keg.  A man with a reputation among some Guyanese as a freedom fighter just tossed a cigarette that glows dangerously.  The PPP Government, its President, Vice President, the PNC Opposition, and Ambassador Lynch are all savvy enough to understand my meanings, my thrusts, my concerns.  They all had better make what I hold high, as their priorities, too.  Guyana’s continuity as a partially orderly polity.

I discard the niceties, for a moment, about humbly and respectfully, for if this is not addressed with American leadership and American intervention in the oil business of Guyana, then Armageddon swirls.  What that man dared to call for, pierced, is what stirs in many Guyanese bosoms.  They have been ostracized, marginalized, demonized, and terrorized.  All know so, and none like the Ambassador.  She can sit on her hands, Guyanese can sift through ashes, should they so desire when that time comes.  This country is on edge.  It doesn’t take much to push it over that edge.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• American, GHK Lall, Guyana, Sarah Ann Lynch, US Ambassador

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