A winner could end up a loser

Jun 04, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The debate is on.  In the wake of the unbelievable Manchester United FA Cup victory over neighbours, archrivals, and European football powerhouse, Manchester City, the issue is what to do with Ten Haag, the on field general of United.  Sport is a business, and Sir Jim Ratcliffe is as ruthless a businessman as the best of them.  Business tycoons and magnates do not rise to the top by being Mother Teresa.  His biggest thoughts can be summarized in this way: after all the money put up to buy a minority share in ManU, how do I recoup my investment in the fastest time?

Who is the football leader that gives me the best shot of improving rapidly on the dollar front? European football has its abundant monetary rewards, and ManU has not been in the thick of it.  In two four-word questions: do I keep Ten Haag?  Is he the best?  I would like to linger on this in the post victory ecstasy of real-life, the world of British boardrooms and English Football, but the call to national duty pushes me to the surreal world of Guyana.  Political Guyana.  The new Guyana that can’t afford to be like the old one, that does not have the luxury of, ahm, too many slippages, the bigger ones especially.

The new Guyana is about oil.  Big oil.  Is there anything else, notwithstanding local business taxes, housing, cost of living (on the money side), and the more routine sex and violence taking their places in the spotlight.  Oil is the man, and he is an absolute monarch.  Any talk about oil means that a remarkably fine son of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo seeps, then washes, into the conversation. When Jagdeo speaks, the world listens.  Reuters just gave him a plug about gas fields based on one of his recent press powwows.  I wonder what they think of the extra-curriculars that are such a huge part of the Vice President’s and General Secretary’s press blasts.  Do they have a good laff over their Remy Martin, chortle over his churlishness as they share with one another in this era of instant communication in a wired world?  Irrelevant!  Immaterial, too!  In Guyanese vernacular: ‘wha kine ah leadah is dah?’  But the reason that Bharrat Jagdeo name features alongside English Football and ManU (a sacrilege, to be sure) is because the word failure has dogged his leadership existence.

They are too well known with one costly project (and all suspicious smelling) after another failing.  If they haven’t collapsed, they collapsed the purse of Guyana. Everything that he gets near to, touches in some manner, has some taint, some sense that all is not alright.  The worst part of the problem is that he makes sure that he is always around anything that is about lots of money, and it is hell to separate him from it.  In another environment, a real one, Jagdeo would be deemed a pathological loser, and thrown out on his, er, pants.  No more big projects.  No more cash.  No more patience.  No more leadership responsibilities.  Of course, that’s the real world, and since Guyana is not, he is not under any such pressure, like a Ten Haag.  The man just won and he could still lose his job.

After having failed with projects in various sectors, Jagdeo has now awarded himself the biggest plum.  Oil.  If this national leader did what had to be done, he would have all Guyana paying homage to him.  I would knock over other Guyanese to be the first in line, as incredible as that sounds.  Instead, he is happiest crawling his way around under Exxon’s size-12 shoes.  When Guyanese should be making moves to get the best out of its enormous oil wealth, the oil czar can’t get his act together, can’t get his words in the right order.  Like Ten Haag of Manchester United, there are grave doubts that he got the best out of all the assets he had in his hands.  At least, the Dutchman tried. The national jury has already decided that Jagdeo does no such thing, takes the easy way out.  He makes it his duty to attack objecting Guyanese who call him out on oil.  A camouflage that is a distraction that does not work anymore.  It is Exxon all the way and hooray for Routledge and Woods and the rest of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre Gang.  I give my fellow Guyanese one guess about who are the ones that are being ogled and mangled.

In the real world, Ten Haag is disposable.  In Guyana, who is going to fire Jagdeo, other than the man himself?  If Nigel D is not going anywhere, then BJ isn’t.  Not with that all that oil money floating around. Ten Haag won one of the biggest prizes in European football, and all the odds are that he is on his way out.  Jagdeo never had a winner to his name, and he is even more firmly cemented in place at the top of the top.  I have one for him: do something (anything) with the Exxon oil contract that he himself tore apart, and I will focus all my time on the books waiting to be written.  Be a winner for once, Jagdeo raja.  Do it!

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

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• archrivals, Bharrat Jagdeo, European football, Guyana, neighbours

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