Leaders must live a love affair with Guyana

May 28, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – White gloves are replaced with boxing gloves.  I challenge President Ali, Vice President Jagdeo, Opposition Leader Norton.  Yes, I challenge, cancel the niceties, with respect due embedded, what should be fully understood.  All three of these leaders should have a love affair with Guyana and the Guyanese people.  Not just their own, but all of them.  The engagements with the past must be nullified, the fears and suspicions of the future managed maturely.  Just as in a new, intimate, relationship.

All the preconceived ideas and conclusions about who has more knowledge, who has what it takes to lead a nation and a people forward must be scrapped.  Or it is not going to work.  Dismissal.  For all their knowing, the first piece of wisdom that they should embrace is that they know nothing.  Nothing that they have done so far has benefited the Guyanese people.  Their insider people, for sure; other Guyanese, well, that’s a crime.  What could be the best combination of politics and duty to the people?  That knowledge, that practice, has still proven to be the Holy Grail that has not yet been found.  The journey has not even embarked upon to find it.  Pointing with reciprocal condemnation certainly has its visceral energy.  But has led to what so far?  A nation divided even deeper, animosities and antagonisms drenching an already oversoaked political and racial environment, and the arrival of the game-changer, oil, to add fuel to the flames?  This is the stuff over which internal wars erupt and great ruptures result.  By some unique magical potion, Messrs. Ali and Jagdeo pretend that they have the solution to bring this country together.  They jest.  It is the latest in a continuing series of errors in judgment.  Costly misjudgments. Repetitive misjudgments.  Unpardonable misjudgments.

The self-serving of Ali and Jagdeo has been glaring.  Both have cast aside shame and brought disgrace upon themselves.  This is how they love the Guyanese people.  By loving the people of Exxon first and totally.  By kissing all the dark places in Exxon’s boardroom and Exxon’s executive suites. By lowering themselves to the lowest levels imaginable, then breaking new ground, and all to please the new American plantation owners with names like Woods and Routledge.  When leaders consent to self-enslavement, what prospect for the people?  How could such people ever have any regard for the local population?  I recommend this to all three Guyanese leaders: abandon what had been embraced before.  Start with a fresh piece of paper and a clean head.  Clean, as in unfettered by what serves personal interests.  If only Guyanese can get leaders that cherish public service as an ideal, as more of a sacred duty, as focused on giving everything for the people, as opposed to using wiles to get more from them. Guyanese lose perennially.  This is what has weakened and sabotaged what could be beneficial to this nation.

On each occasion that the president or the vice president opens his mouth, the first word that pops out is foreign.  The second is Exxon.  I am at word number ten, and I am still waiting to hear either Guyana or Guyanese whispered.  Darren Woods and Alistair Routledge mention Guyana more in their great, gushing, oil productions.  Talk about the place and the people are automatically attached.  For a long time, women were looked upon as sex objects (bombshell, red-hot, desirable).  The ladies have moved on and up.  Guyana is the replacement sex object, and the johns (better make that suitors) from all over the world drool about getting a piece of this new pinup girl.  It should not require a four-year stint at Oxford or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or the one in India, to identify who are the top local pimps.  The first love of leaders ought to be the people.  Not PPP ones alone.  Not PNC worthies only.  Not the indigenous and mixed people and sprinklings of Europeans and Caucasians for what they can contribute to the political equation.  Mr. Ali, Mr. Jagdeo, and Mr. Norton must love the people more than they love themselves.  Yeah, I know that it is tough going with tougher luck every step of the way.  They must love the broadest, widest, deepest, national destiny that could be than they love, let’s see, money. They must show that they are ready to think in a new way.  I would help them challenge the present order, as evidence of their love for country and people.

To love like that is to fight.  I would like to see the day that Exxon fight and win against the massed Guyanese people.  Angry people.  Deadly serious people.  People willing to die.  Die on their feet and for a cause (their own and their children) than to die slowly with a bloated colonoscopy hanging around the groin and dragging down.  How about that for a graphic picture?  This is how Exxon has Ali and Jagdeo and Norton have Guyanese living.  Go ahead, shoot me.  I am ready.  Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.  No wonder they blew half the top of his head off.  As a reminder to all Guyanese, that was done in Texas.  Exxon is in Texas.  Exxon is in Guyana, and a few of us interfere with its smooth sailing.  The company has its Guyanese Lee Oswald Harvey(s) and Jack Ruby(s).  They are easy to identify.

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• conclusions, Guyana, Opposition Leader Norton, President Ali, Vice President Jagdeo

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