Death brings out the startling

Sep 05, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – The Latins gave us the immortal de mortuis nil nisi bonum (of the dead nothing but good is to be said).  I completely agree.  Why tarnish those who have moved on, even when they may have left less than the best in their wake.  In the instance of Guyana’s most recently departed attorney general and minister of justice,, it will be extremely difficult, a test for me.

I congratulate President Ali for his extraordinarily effusive tribute to a Guyanese now no more.  I also congratulate the Hon Attorney General, Mr. Anil Nandlall, for his ringing eulogy of the fallen.  According to both Dr. Ali and Mr. Nandlall, he was an illustrious son of this terrible soil that sows such grand substances into the DNA of its children, living and dead.  Before proceeding, I would be the poorest example of inconsistency, maybe even stifled honesty, if I did not extend a hand of recognition to PPP General Secretary and former head of state, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo for wisely and majestically holding his peace in this instance of cascading and coruscating applause for the departed one.  Sometimes, the most scintillating eloquence is silence, and I believe that Mr. Jagdeo outdid himself by not saying a single word.

True, we must herald to the heavens our heroes.  But they must be heroes through and through, no matter how flawed, especially when the going is at its most perilous.  For what is a hero, if when the day is grim and the hour is tragic, that, like Achilles of Grecian lore, he sulks in his tent, takes himself out of the reckoning in the hour of greatest challenge.  The PPP has made a living, made a killing, and a finely purring global machinery of elections rigging for the 28 long years that they lasted in the first long, uninterrupted season.  And if there is one area of governance and democracy in this country about which the PPP is 150% or 1000% right, it is rigging.  Memory is faded nowadays, but if I remember well, there was a man, a stalwart, an effervescent and irrepressibly luminous presence, around those rigging proceedings.  It would have taken an infant or the infantile in adults not to have known what was at work, and what were the results of that harrowing era in Guyana’s history.  We cannot continue to condemn Burnham and spare the others.  Any other. Why, even former president David Granger came in for his blows about his role around ballot boxes when he was a young soldier. So, if LFS Burnham, Hammie Green, and David Granger are hauled barefoot over the incandescent coals and scalded with an inch of their respective departed and ongoing existences, then the least that there can be is some consistency in this time of hushed tones and solemn syntactical sweetness.

I will recognize any man for his achievements, and the fallen former Attorney General and Minister of Justice had many achievements laced with dazzling splendor.  Instead of coming down heavily on him for sharing and participating in, and then condoning, a great fraud and tragedy on Guyana, I simply say that if the run of the PNC was cut short, and in which he ranked so highly and powerfully, then where would he have been.  What would he have been able to leverage, use as his calling card, to reach the heights that he did, since there would have been nothing?  Cheddi Jagan’s dispatch into the political wilderness certainly paved the way for the ascendancy of many a man and woman of Guyana.  On the back of rigging, some ended up riding a stairway to a heaven of their own making, the product of their ambitions, and of neither hearing nor seeing nor knowing.  I am trying to be kind here because it is the dearly departed involved.  I acknowledge it is a struggle.  But there is awe at the distinctive genius it takes to represent two sides in a subsidiary deal, which still results in the home side coming up short.  How’s that for extraordinary skill and craftsmanship?

It’s why there is a special regard for President Ali and Attorney General Nandlall and their easy conscience with what they have made a custom to condemn 24/7.  To denounce the outcome is one thing, but I suppose that death spares those who were once in the middle of its celebrations, while their countrymen and women languished wherever they could find succor.  Almost half the population lost to emigration. Almost all the best and brightest lost in the flight of precious human capital. It is why Guyana is the country it is today.  It provides evidence of the quality of what is left, with which there is this great, endless, seemingly futile grappling that leads nowhere but shouting in each other’s faces.

Thus, as surprising as it is, and stilted, if not overdone, as the tributes appear to be, it is still a positive to hear the lilting cadences of those practiced in the fine arts of filtering circumstances for their own purposes, and saying what suits the moment.  No matter how much such clashes with was raged about uninterruptedly.  If it were not for death, then what would be left for us to discover the better angels inside.  To a man gone, a Guyanese of standing, perhaps some peace and profoundness will be his wherever he lands.  He usually did.

(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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• Attorney General, GHK Lall, Guyanese, immortal, Latins, Mr. Anil Nandlall

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