Vincent Adams: the contradiction, the revelation

Aug 10, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Vincent Adams is a “good technical” man.  That wasn’t me.  It was Guyana’s man in the know, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo who said so.  When wise men speak, I listen.  Sometimes.  So much said in that simple statement.  About Vincent Adams, good technical man.  About Bharrat Jagdeo, good policymaker.  About Guyana, good earth that it is.  All these goodies, yet Guyana is going down a path of self-destruction, one full of many contradictions, many revelations.  One of each is good enough for this sharing with Guyanese; Americans are included, especially Dr. Alistair Routledge.  Everywhere I turn, somebody’s slip is showing, and it is not that of the ladies.

Vincent Adams is a “good technical” person.  Aw shucks, I forgot my grooming: Dr. Vincent Adams.  His doctorate was earned the old-fashioned way, neither honorary nor heavy with uncertainty.  First, the contradiction in that statement from my topsy-turvy brother, Bharrat.  I hesitate, but national duty requires gently correcting the contradiction in Dr. J.  Fact 1: Dr. Jagdeo himself has said that Guyana suffers from a capacity shortage.  Yes sir! Fact 2: Excellency Ali said that Guyana doesn’t have quality people.  Hear, hear!  Am I the dumbest Guyanese, more so when both great Guyanese leaders have pounded home that point about severe shortages of high-quality technical people?  Fact 3: Lament and bemoan dilute leadership griefs about local technical deficiencies.  But they are the best that I have, a humble confession of my own limitations.

Instead of another fact, or a fusillade, I have an inquiry for Dr. Jagdeo: since Dr. Adams is a “good technical” presence, then why is he on the sidelines, banished to the rolling grasslands of Tennessee?  This cannot be the best policy for Guyana, when there is such an acute deficit of technical people (by leadership admission, I remind) to man and manage the massive national oil bonanza?  Rather than a known, proven bonanza, perhaps it is better to say sweepstakes, in that there is a huge element of luck-and-chance involved.  With the honorable AG Nandlall’s benevolent permission, I assert that there is a contradiction in a good technical party of Dr. Vincent Adams’s prowess put out to pasture.  Dr. Jagdeo may strenuously disagree, but I persist with both constitutional and democratic right to persist that a significant (and revealing) contradiction exists.  I go easy on the onions (revelation) for now.  We are seriously short of technical capacity, but we can stuff a man like Vincent Adams in a suitcase and send him to serenade the good ole boys in Chattanooga.

Respectfully, Dr. J, I think that Dr. A belongs in Guyana, and on those offshore rigs, where so much rigging [of a particular kind] could be going on.  It is my painful duty to refresh President Dr. Ali’s memory that it was he himself who said that the man Adams was on leave, to provide space for Guyana to work things out, but there is always room for a knowledge people (good technical people).  Three little subtitles must be shared to assist Freedom House, OP, OVP, and the other political penitentiaries in Guyana.  First, I get all the dirty jobs in this country, i.e., having to hold a president’s hand and point him to what came out of his head.  Second, before anyone gets upset, the words I put in Dr. Ali’s mouth are mine, but they represent what he said in layman terms.  Third, since that was the presidential position on Dr. Adams (and Dr, Jagdeo’s as well – ‘we could always use a skilled man’), then I think that these leading men, both doctors of the realm, may have mixed up one antidote to Guyana’s troubles with some anesthetic that induced amnesia.  The concern is that for most matters, the amnesia is temporary for both men, but for people like Vincent Adams and others, the memory lapse is permanent.  There are two revelations embedded.

The first is that Vincent Adams is a political man.  I hear that, but I also see Mr. Carl Greenidge.  Then, there is Joe Hamilton.  If I were to be reincarnated a million times, I couldn’t be half as PNC as them.  Is Dr. Jagdeo still gleaming gloriously about who is political?  Particularly when the same Comrade Joseph Hamilton (not to be mistaken for Joseph the husband of Mary) had his own exuberant street pedigree. The second revelation is a tad torrid but cannot be avoided.  Drs. Ali and Jagdeo are mighty comfortable with Messrs. Greenidge and Hamilton, but they dread the mere mention of the name Vincent Adams.  Perhaps, his Linden heritage has something to do with that horror.  If Mr. Alistair Routledge thought that he and Exxon are going to be spared, then he needs another slug of his Jack Daniels.  PNC stalwarts and strongmen like Carl and Joe can be welcomed into the PPP reservations, but not Vincent.  And we are in dire need of technical people.  From contradiction to revelation: who doesn’t want Adams here?  What kind of contagious disease does he have, other than being the man who knows too much (about oil).  He may not be Jimmy Stewart, but Exxon fears Vincent Adams as if he is Guyana’s Clint Eastwood of Dirty Harry history.  He will see too much (oil), question too much (oil), pushback too much (oil), straighten too many offshore and onshore things too much (oil).  This was what the same Adams did at the US Department of Energy, and Exxon doesn’t want a repeat of that kind of trauma.  In fairness, if I want to do things my way, a man like Adams is my worst nightmare.  Therefore, it had to be from GT to Tennessee for Vinny.  Politics was not a consideration nor inhibition with Greenidge nor Hamilton, but it was and is with Adams.  The difference between the two of them and the good technical man Adams is oil.  Where there is oil, there is Exxon.  And where there is Exxon, there can’t be any kind of Vincent Adams, not even his shadow, nary his whisper.  I regret the loss of this good technical character in Guyana’s continuing political and oil soap opera.  It is more than how much an Adams could tell Guyana today about offshore ops; it is how much he could teach those saplings fresh out of universities.  To Drs. Ali and Jagdeo, I handover this early Xmas gift: I may be the dumbest Guyanese, but I’m not the stupidest.  Peace and goodwill to all men.

(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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• contradiction, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, GHK Lall, revelation, Vincent Adams

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