The jagged edge

Jun 20, 2024 News, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – For some reason, Vice President Jagdeo has fooled himself, cavorts happily over where he is.  It is a pretense, the angles and fandangoes that he subjects himself to every Thursday.  He is caught on the edges of a jagged dilemma, a product of his own distorted mind.  He opens his mouth, and he falls into a hole.  He keeps it closed, and his own people perceive that in Bharrat “I am Guyana” Jagdeo is a man who has dug holes to bury his many secrets into which he again tumbles.  He makes himself look weak and contemptible when he speaks; and when he refuses to answer questions (‘I dealt with that already’), he registers as a man on the run, one fleeing from his own odor.

When the national oilman stands in what he believes is robust defence of the 2016 Exxon, he is Exxon-shaming himself.  Like those cruelly and unthinkingly humiliated for their obesity condition, Jagdeo does that to himself, through his greasy, slippery state with his latest best friend, the Exxon contract. When the big man rises to the level of local defender-in-chief of Exxon, to the grim detriment of his fellow Guyanese, before his own dwindling crowd of voters, he reduces himself to a forlorn figure jagged and shredded by his frailties.  The insecurities of the man surface in the public domain, and his groping, stuttering uncertainty is a spectacle to behold.  He tied bundle with Exxon; therefore, he must now pick up his bed and walk with it.  Oh yes, I know!  I know that I mixed and mangled metaphors, but they hold true, because he can’t walk the talk.

Talk he does, and that is a mouthful that no Listerine nor black sage nor vinegar can sort to the right state of hygiene.  Something smells, the air is laden with what is suspicious, what does not make sense, what speaks to a leader who has done more than missed a few steps.  It is of a national caricature, a former head of state who has fallen flat on his face.  For those Guyanese who still care about the most principled oil stewardship and with responses to match, I recommend the nearest statue in the Promenade Gardens.  Jagdeo has no tone that rings, only the stone that he has become, and which stares and snarls.  ‘I am ah gonna get you’…teach you and your kind a lesson…It is the signal for the PPP not-so-secret weapon, Live in Guyana, to be lined up and spring into action at the defiant, the deviationists, and the undefeatable in this society.  This is what a press confab has degenerated to: a disease packaged into an hour or so, and where each is the most peculiar form of 60Minutes programing that Guyanese will ever view.  CBS would be in the television ratings doghouse, if not grave, if it were Bharrat Jagdeo at his mouth-foaming, lip-hissing and throat-spitting best that was aired.  My Gawd! How does Guyana keep delving in its genes and producing for public consumption people like Jagdeo, that is the question?

The lust for power by any means led to the 2019-2020 bargains.  There are none better at horse-trading than those that the Confederates used to call ‘Goddamn Yankees.’  I think that they still address them that way, but in a more muted and selective manner.  Part of Jagdeo’s bargains from the last elections was that he defends to the death both Exxon and its excrement.  That would be the revolting 2016 contract.  Poor Bharrat!  For there he is forced to paint an ugly house without paint, or paintbrush, while it is raining cats and dogs, and the occasional viper stings him where he is most exposed and sensitive.  Did some smart Guyanese say that the day of reckoning and delivering can be leadership castration? If that is still too uncivilized, then how about the brawls that are now the jagged, ragged, naked Jagdeo of weekly press conference infamy?  The truth of the national oil patrimony has become this twisted, this demented: curses that cure nothing; political webs that trap its maker; and tricks that hustlers would swiftly recognize.  Count Grigori (Rasputin), Houdini, Ponzi and Machiavelli would all have been proud.  If I were a soulless barbarian, a ruthless capitalist, a mindless, heinous partisan, then I must say that I would have been awed at Jagdeo’s antics, his tantrums, and his bum rushes.  But not as a Guyanese of poor roots, the product of humble beginnings, with an ear and an eye to my peers who are limping, dragging, and all but stopped hoping.

I should distance myself from the unsteady and the unready.  But there is something, that fire which burns brightly that just won’t let me be.  Perhaps, it is the sum of all the injustices.  It is the jagged edges of Bharrat Jagdeo, Chief Minister, Oil Minister, Minister of Exxon, and Minister of Diminishment.  Not on just the issues, but of himself now sliced and scalded and soaked in brine.  It couldn’t have happened to a better fellow, a finer Guyanese gentleman.  Guyana!  Guyana!

(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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• Bharrat Jagdeo, Defence, Exxon, Goddamn Yankees, Guyana, My Gawd, Promenade Gardens

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