H@rd Truths by GHK Lall – Sketches of Oil Leadership – VP Jagdeo, a Profile in Wiles and Guiles

Aug 18, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – I think of oil, and there is this nightmare: where will Guyana end up with this vast oil richness, given the leadership wretchedness of Guyana’s finest, Bharat Jagdeo?  It is my pain and regret to share that it is a long, dark road that he is taking this country down; the slippery precipice to which he had led Guyanese.  From the nation’s soggy intellectual pool to the swamps teeming with its insipid, from the flood of self-blinding fanatics to the multitudes of the hoping for small slivers from their oil treasure, it is the same story.  It is of Guyanese dismayed and dispirited by the appallingly dreadful nature of the leader that is Bharat Jagdeo, once a President, still President.

The story of Bharat Jagdeo is a tragic one.  A man, a leader, a character who took the wrong bend in the road, and even if he wishes now, cannot turn back.  Frankly, he has no such wish, for brother Jagdeo has fallen in love with his leadership style, which is all about guile with oil.  Instead of a profile in courage with oil, this is a profile of leadership shrinkage and miscarriage.  I bypass addiction to truculence, lust for power; though integral, I leave unsaid pervasive spitefulness, the sheer vindictiveness.  When what is written and said, the word would have been whispered to Live in Guyana to conjure it newest criminal episode, deliver crooked escapade.

My focus on Bharat Jagdeo’s husbandry of the nation’s oil confirms how his wiles and guiles are inseparable from his tense leadership smiles.  I weighed how to make this shine brightly, and I came up with characters straight out of two immortal pieces from literature’s storehouse that fit his oil management to a perfect tee.

The first is Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.  With the top-hatted crowd of foreigners now dancing excitedly all over Guyana, with the ABC &EU people in the forefront, Dr. Jagdeo is the epitome of the suave, silky, Dr. Jekyll.  At least, he does his best imitations of urbanity and sincerity when his audiences are made of national plenipotentiaries standing alongside powerbrokers for gigantic commercial enterprises.  When this country’s oil patrimony is on the front burner (always is nowadays), Dr. Jagdeo goes on a charm offensive and behind thin smiles and calculating eyes, he is about doing what pleases these people with plummy, lockjawed, accents.  Though overmatched in the company of the Oxbridge and Ivy League crowd, he is runaway champion in the one department where he rules effortlessly: wiles and guiles.  It is to the enduring loss of Guyanese that those are not employed for their benefit, that those bargains and barters involving their oil (and other) wealth are not first for their prosperity.

When serious and sharp (pushy) questions are raised by conscientious Guyanese, then the other side of the Dr. Jekyll-Dr. Jagdeo personality flares into being.  Enter, Mr. Hyde.  Brother Jagdeo convulses into this deformity of a figure before everyone: all snarls, all viciousness, all of what is a completely frightening apparition; an unhealthily frightened one.  The first reaction is what secrets do this man carry around in his head that weigh him down so powerfully.  My second is what forces him to twist himself into all these tangled webs, when straight talk on oil is all that matters.  Why is there the drivel and jive, when clean answers should rush from his lips, and flush from his fevered brain coiled to operate a certain way?

Like Robert Stevenson’s post medieval masterpiece on the torments in the skull, it is proof of how simple inquiries, writings, positions reduce Dr. Jagdeo into Guyana’s equivalent of a fearsome Mr. Hyde.  There is the horror of a man driven to extremes, one stalking and bashing any Guyanese who dare to stand in his way, raise a hand, and say: not this way, sir.  It is my belief that the Americans have let loose the CIA and its psychoanalysts to study our brother, Dr. Jagdeo, especially in the limelight of Guyana’s oil.  In this manner, they have a considerable edge in dealing with him.  They do, which is why they know his wiles, and see through his guiles. On each occasion that this self-wounding brother obfuscates and prevaricates, he unwittingly provides unchallengeable confirmation of his modus operandi.  He is so far committed in his labored and tormented way of managing this oil that it has become his way of life.

In many ways, oil supremo Jagdeo has metamorphosed into French writer, Jules Verne.  Ask the Guyanese oil steward anything about oil, and it is the Vice President’s version of ‘Around the World in 80 Days’.  Dr. Jagdeo is reincarnated as wily and tricky representations of Mr. Fogg and Mr. Fix.  His story is foggy, and there is usually something about the fix in his productions.

Guyanese are left hanging, as Bharat Jagdeo keeps yanking their chains with this oil.  Trick answers and postures are now his inerasable trademarks, his multiheaded makeup.  Wiles and guiles have brought Bharat Jagdeo this far; the road ahead is rocky and blanketed with trouble.  Both for Bharat Jagdeo and the tinderbox that is Guyana.

(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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• GHK Lall, Guiles, H@rd Truths, leadership, VP Jagdeo

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