Hard Truths by GHK Lall – Excellency Ali is not Guyana

Feb 25, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The past does open a window to the future.  A political experiment gone wrong.  The law of unintended consequences triumph.  A presentation that is a prophecy cloaked in a premonition.  I fear for this country.  I am long pass fearing for myself, never really did from very young.  There is His Excellency, President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali, who stands as the first billboard, a neon exhibition.  Then there is the PPP Government.  It is a political comedy cum crime cum calamity portending a national catastrophe.  First, the past, followed by the rest.

I recall some agitation in pacified, but still restless, Buxton early in the Ali presidency.  The president visited and engaged residents, and a man passed, but made sure that he was heard: “yu’all gat visitors.”  President Ali pounced: ‘who is he?  He doan kno who he messin’ wid.  He better doan mess wid me…’  Fellow Guyanese, there was His Excellency, Guyana’s head of state.  What I interpreted was the headman ready to be a headhunter to manifest how much of a head-start he has in that field of operations.  Guyanese in my time had a word – ‘ignaar’, what American call a ‘head case.’ It was a window of things to come.  For the record, the offending passerby was Dr. David Hinds, a man who has earned his stripes: Burnham jailed him for living his convictions. The racists in the PPP Government call him a racist.  He is my brother, so maybe that makes me into one also.  Definitely a tribal traitor.  But back to the president.

President Ali has shrugged off the cobwebs and mutated from strength to strength, but not in a direction that is beneficial to either country or citizens.  He does more than imitate his sponsor and creator, President Bharrat Jagdeo.  He has surpassed him in the lashing out and brawling about departments. Cash handouts and cleanup campaigns and kissing babies aside, he has become a figure that lampoonists dream about.  This leader does not listen to loyal Guyanese.  He listens, like emperors of yore, to his court of fawning, brownnosing, advisers and analyzers who point enemies to him, lead down a precipitous path. How else will they justify their existence, collect their pay? Most of the time, Excellency Ali, now Emperor Ali listens to the voices warring in his head.  Oil contract honor.  Naysayers.  ‘Experts’.  He is not a man given to introspection, but one never less than fully dedicated to the devastation of Guyanese enemies.  Imagined enemies, I say.  Look and listen to him today, three and half years later.

He has become a power unto himself, one infused with the infallibility of divinity.  The more that President deigns to address the peasants of Guyana, the less presidential he sounds, the more of a Pontifex Maximus is heard and seen. In his overwrought head, Excellency fancies himself to be the chief high priest of Guyana.  The leader has appointed himself Emperor of Guyana.  I assert that it is a self-anointment.  He has that collared an air of infallibility about noble personage.  Somebody should give the man a scepter; he already gave himself a crown. In Emperor Ali’s construction he is Guyana.  The sum and substance of it. In him resides the majesty and magnificence of it: all of both.  Buxton and ‘he doan kno who he messin’ wid’ was a prophecy that is now Guyana’s premonition.  Of worse in the making.

This is what the now fading power in Guyana, one Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, experimented with in the laboratory that is his own conflicted and cunning head.  Who will be controller and who will be controlled has picked up a virus.  The Young Turn turned out to be a different kind of Turkish delight.  President Ali has gathered his assets, nurtured his base, and neither are for Jagdeo.  When I come across some of Excellency Ali’s fulminations-impatient, raging, dismissive-he has crept past the Vice President in the departments of hostility, aggression, and naked belligerence.  ‘Doan mess wid me’, remember.  Now, this puts the omniscient one, (who else but Jagdeo) in a bind.  His experiment in leadership manipulation has blown up in his face, and 2025 is next month, as in around the corner.

In my estimation Ali is alive in 25, and possibly as far as 55, if not beyond.  All he has to do is not get any ideas with the Yanks, play his cards smoothly with Alistair and Darren, and he will be alright.  He behaves himself, and he is the best.  Meanwhile, his own people grow in power and influence.  And I am not speaking about TikTok and Instagram.  Or ‘X’, formerly Twitter.

I pity Dr. Barry.  Indeed, the best laid plans of mice and snakes do often result in torments of the soul.  Live honestly, learn a lot. Jagdeo fell in love with playing many political games.  Now that they have boomeranged, he has to deal with the backfire.  His own people are hopping mad, mighty unhappy.  Anil is weak contradiction, Vindya simmers quietly, uneasily.  This experiment of Jagdeo has gotten out of hand.  It is the law of unintended consequences.  It rarely fails.

(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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• consequences, GHK Lall, hard truths, Law, political

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