Honor, respect, sanctity

Oct 06, 2024 Editorial

Editorial…

Kaieteur News – Guyana’s President Irfaan Ali is that rarest of combinations. He is a wily politician who is also a slick salesman. One who says what he knows his foreign audiences want to hear, even when his own people have to pay prices that they cannot afford.

In a recent interview with the widely read New York Times (NYT), the president used some words that have a pleasing echo to them, but which many Guyanese can attest have been serious challenges for his PPPC Government. In the NYT interview, President Ali was generousness itself when he gave the context of the 2016 ExxonMobil oil contract with Guyana. Not content with that, he then launched into words that represent his standard sales pitch. Words like honor, respect, and sanctity relative to the ExxonMobil oil contract that enslaves a whole country for generations to come. Indeed, those are surprising words coming from the Guyanese president, who has not been known to have much familiarity with them, or even too much use for them. Like many salesmen of a certain standing, the issue that would not let go is whether the seller truly believes in what he is selling, if he even has the required depth to know that of which he speaks so richly.

President Ali did the right thing, restated some truths that cannot and should not be contradicted. “I have said this a number of times. They [Exxon, Hess, and CNOOC] had the better hand. Though the president took a subdued line (“better hand”) it is accurate, though it would be more in line with the realities of the lopsided ExxonMobil contract that it has the whole hand, and just an insulting courtesy finger joint left for Guyana.

President Ali is not known to be circumspect, but in the NYT interview, he was the politest of schoolboys in the way he described the ExxonMobil contract. From our vantage point, this is a head of state, who is more concerned about preserving his political head than speaking the unsparing truth about how obscene and totally diseased the ExxonMobil document is. To assign credit as due, “the better hand” held by ExxonMobil et al is a small breath of truth. So, too, is his claim that his government inherited the deal, what is nothing but a yoke on Guyana.

Then the pitchman in Guyana’s president could not be contained any longer, he just bubbled over: “there’s something called sanctity of contract. Can I just walk in there and say, okay…we are not going to honor this contract.” And that, “right on this stage, that there is a tyrant and dictator in Guyana who does not respect contract, who does not respect sanctity of contract…” Guyana’s president may be excused his characteristic exaggerated exuberance on the world stage, but his PPPC Government is not the best entity to pretend at gleaming with honor, or respect, or what has to do with sanctity on most things in Guyana. Guyanese know that the incumbent PPPC Government failed to honor its firm commitment to review and renegotiate the monstrous ExxonMobil contract. Guyanese know also that both the president and Vice President Jagdeo made powerful promises about the disaster that the ExxonMobil contract represented. Guyanese know further how much they both said that they were going to do to reverse its crippling provisions to the benefit of this nation. And what Guyanese know and now live with to their ongoing regret, is how both Ali and Jagdeo have turned their backs on the sanctity of the feverish oaths they made to locals.

We seek neither to insult nor scorn President Ali’s enchanting commercial about honor and respect for sanctity. We do our duty and enlighten the overenthusiastic national leader that he is the embodiment of what is shallow before Guyanese. He has not shown the level of honor and respect for them by upholding, by fighting for, by being totally about what came out of his mouth before relative to the ExxonMobil contract that is the product of deformity at its worst. Honor and respect, President Ali, begins at home, and of that there can be no greater sanctity. It is the sacred leadership compact made with citizens.

(Honor, respect, sanctity)

CNOOC, contradicted, Exxon, ExxonMobil, Guyanese, Hess, President Al

Latest News