The Ali, Jagdeo, Norton trinity

Mar 13, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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H@rd Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Here is a question for all oil rich Guyanese: what does President Ali, Vice President Jagdeo, and Opposition Leader Norton have in common?  With due regard to the fine practitioners of palmistry and prophesy, these three leading men in Guyana’s political trinity have become associated with the future.  Predictions about the future.  Entanglements with the future.  Depending on the future.  The future is what all three of these grand men in Guyana’s political leadership trinity have hinged their own standings on.  It is my duty to call a dog a dog: in this instance, what Guyanese have is an unholy trinity. Politics and strange bedfellows.

Guyanese are struggling in their numbers to cope with a hard guava season present, and this band of brothers, this titillating political threesome, is busy emphasizing the future.  It was the Right Honorable Bharrat Jagdeo who started the ball rolling with this business about the future.  He would do well in the oil markets as a Futures trader.  The problem for him is that everything he puts his hands on turns into the stuff of septic tanks.  Nowhere to run but smelling to the heavens.  This man is dangerous to the wellbeing of Guyanese.  Jagdeo decided he found a winner to holdup impatient Guyanese.  Sell them on the future.  Of what could be, in all its loaded weight, its lush glitter.  Like a Powerball ticket, which he is sure is the guaranteed winner.  Jagdeo does a holdup of distrusting Guyanese by sticking them up.  Wait for tomorrow, he promises, as he emphasizes more production, winding down overall expenses, and maximizing revenues.  It is the same shady story: tomorrow will be better.  I urge all Guyanese to look back at every damn politician in this country, and they should come to this grey conclusion: tomorrow never comes, has never in a Guyana which has some many gifts.  It has been more than mere political leadership follies.  It has been leadership felonies.  Jagdeo sells Guyanese on the future with ‘maximizing revenues’ (arranges with Alistair Routledge to sing his version of the revenue chorus from the sidelines).  To my fellow Guyanese, this bright talk of the future is Jagdeo selling Guyanese a snake but marketing it as salmon.  He is hoping that oil prices will behave, travel in are warding upward trajectory.  Many have been the expert oilmen who have made that bet, only to lose their shirt and shorts.  Jagdeo the prophet is smart enough to know that financial models are like those on carpeted catwalks: they sway from side to side, and they sometimes stumble.  In the lingo of the oil trade, the commodity on which so much of the present and future hinge is volatile.

Opposition Leader Norton has also found his niche strategy, his niche of operations.  He, too, is depending wholly on the narrow confines of the future.  He has made it his mantra to speak of oil in the context of the future, like Jagdeo.  When the future brings the return of the opposition back into power, all these great oil things that are suspended in midair currently will be high on the agenda for aggressive addressing and action.  Somebody (I have a good idea of those involved; just look northward) must have influenced brother Norton to accept a raincheck to rely upon in the future.  The thinking from this side of the creek is that he is holding on to a bounce check.  Guyana is into oil, and so should Mr. Norton.  The problem is that he is dealing in rubber checks, promises and hopes that lack substance.  Thus, when comrade Norton talks of the future, waits on the future, and bets the house (better make that palm tree) on the future, he is clinging to smoke.  The fellows on Duke Street and in Exxon’s towers are good at this, for they have done the same thing, wherever they take up residence.

Then, there is the newest member of Guyana’s unholy political leadership trinity, Excellency Ali taking up his position, with ready script in hand.  It is an encyclopedia embossed with a single word on its cover, and as the sum of its content: future.  The future of oil will facilitate paying more to public servants currently starving on their feet, and mad enough to devour a crab dawg.  This is a leader who has never seen a loan dangled in the present that he has not loved, but one who highlights the future.  Here is a political plotter who presides over draining the nation’s oil fund in the present but is ludicrous and frivolous enough to stare into the future when it is the current wellbeing of ordinary Guyanese that is under assault.  This is the now times, Excellency Ali; the new times of oil, O Esteemed One, talking about the future is the patented farce of those who sell what they do not own.  Shamans do that, not principled presidents; people-oriented ones.  I again beat the same goatskin: build a little less (just a little), give the afflicted people a little more.  A little something that has buying power and staying power would work.  It has to be now, and not in the never, neverland that the future sometimes boils down to, leaving the wretched more emptyhanded, and empty of stomach and hope.

My parting greeting to Drs. Ali, Jagdeo, and Norton is simple: the future is right now.

(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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• Guyana’s, Opposition Leader Norton, practitioners, President Ali, Vice President Jagdeo

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