President Ali projects a troubling facility with words

Sep 19, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – President Ali has gotten too comfortable with a certain facility with words.  He says whatever is scripted for him or comes to his head in the heat of the moment.  He does get a rush of blood to the head, from time to time, usually at the worse times.  One such moment was his energetic reaction to Dr. Bertram Ramcharan’s take on democracy versus shades of autocracy in Guyana.  The national leader may mislead himself into thinking he has persuaded Guyanese masses into falling for his verbal cleverness.  I help with several doses of unpleasant reality.

In response to Dr. Ramcharran, President Ali was all high dudgeon, went on a verbal warpath.  “The most community-based government” he was proud to advertise which, if accurate, would not fit autocracy in action, but only democracy on the move.  In other contexts, the same President Ali was pleased with himself to broadcast that his PPP Government is “the most transparent of all” and ‘the most inclusive of all.’  When the gods thunder, it is safer for mere mortals to seek shelter.  Something is wrong with me, for I must dare the odds and respectfully beg to differ with Guyana’s esteemed leader, Excellency Irfaan Ali.

When President Ali speaks of his group being the “most community-based government” he is better advised to exclude the communities of Mocha, Chinese Landing, and Isseneru.  In view of what has been dished out to those savaged communities, I think that the president may wish to rethink.  Because if anyone other than a president or a prime minister had coined such words, they risk being deemed dissociated from truth at best; or lacking in the requisite disregard for dishonesty at worst.  The president could be occasionally given the benefit of his high office and excused for these exaggerations that boomerang back into his face, these verbal exuberances that cut him off at the knees relative to the standing that he should have.  But after a time, they become tiring, boring, and glaring in their blinding contradictions with Guyanese realities.

To take this to a more intimate level, I humbly suggest that he leaves out his own Leonora, the homeland of his younger years. It is a community that is under siege, a community that is being held hostage by elements reported to have close ties to his government.  Leonora is not the only community in Guyana that is tortured by appalling noise pollution levels.  It is so widespread as to constitute a national epidemic, I would say even makes a devastating contribution to Guyana’s educational efforts.  When the plights of Lenora and other communities similarly brutalized are left unattended, how could that ever be community-oriented, community-protective, community-based in terms of interests and the priorities of the majority, who are mostly law-abiding?

At other times, President Ali has gleamed darkly with claims about being the ‘most inclusive government of all.’  Somebody at the Office of the President must be bold enough to be the kind of keeper that the president needs.  When he is wisely preempted from continuing with his monopoly on inaccuracy, then there is no need for any of the postmortems that it is my tough duty to do.  A truly inclusive government and president are not addicted to an autocracy with thought, an autocracy with words, that bar any differing or, worse yet, any contradicting. When an entity such as IDPADA-G is rendered to the state that it is now in, and all because of this compulsion towards total control, then the lofty inclusiveness of which the president speaks so boldly is dashed to pieces, crumbles to dust.  To make matters more intolerable, the specious grounds under which IDPADA-G fell, shames all claims that PPP Government leaders have made, or may make going forward, about transparency and accountability. When people and entities do wrong, then I am the first to say that they must be fully dealt with, as permissible under the law.  But such must apply to both adversaries and allies. But something else must also be said. To divide based on deceptions and what is patently fabricated drives a nail into any claim by the president relative to being the most inclusive of all.  When communities in the Guyana demographic have been treated unequally, and rent apart with wanton recklessness, then any leadership position about inclusivity suffers from nothing less than unprecedented hypocrisy.  What this conforms is that the president is too quick with sweet words, and all too dismissive of what Guyanese realities wave in his face and shout at increasing volumes in his ear.

How long will the president play his games with hollow words that mean nothing, which maintain the façade of the PPP Government being the most transparent of all?  Nothing would give greater delight than to support that when it is solid.  For transparency would mean some accountability, with strides made towards incorruptibility.  All three are what have bedeviled PPP and PNC governments without letup, and the president knows this.  The president could be backed, but only when the secrets in the oil sector are no more.  President Ali himself had given his word to revisit and revise all contracts.  If there is one word that I wish that he had done his damnedest to honor, it would be that one.  Four years later, the president has distanced from his word. I am all for President Ali (or anyone) being freewheeling and pioneering with words, but on one condition only.  What is stated must be evident.  What is promised must be produced.  President Ali hasn’t.

(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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• Dr. Bertram Ramcharan, GHK Lall, Guyana, verbal, worse

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