Concerned about the president

Nov 16, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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…Hard Truths

By GHK Lall

 Kaieteur News- I am concerned for President Ali.  Those who wish to laugh are free to do so.  But when the president of Guyana speaks and postures, he doesn’t represent only himself or his political group.  He represents all Guyana.  He speaks for me.  Therefore, my concern grows when he lets loose with dramatic rhetorical flair, when he himself is unconcerned about how Guyanese view him, how the wider watching world sees him, judges him.  By now, it should be obvious that my worry has nothing to do with Excellency Ali’s sanity.  Rather, it is about his tight familiarity with unreality, his comfort with the reputation that he accumulates whenever he missteps, however he misspeaks.

After four revealing years, it is obvious that Guyana’s youthful and rollicking president has immersed himself in a big, bottomless bubble bath.  He has immersed himself so completely that he is totally unconscious as to what goes on outside of his self-made bubble.  President Ali is now Guyana’s Mr. Unreality.  He has been given more than his share of free passes because of his lack of years, and his newness to the captain’s bridge.

The problem is that when he peers at the Guyana landscape laid out before him, he sees a combination of paradise, an old-time Persian palace, and the hanging Gardens of Babylon.  He sees what he wants to see and says whatever comes to his lips.  It is a volatile mix, a most dangerous combination.  So, he jumps on the nearest high horse and gallops with rhetorical winds at his back, without regard to facts and circumstances, balance and a stickler’s respect for accuracy.  If the president had engaged in his verbal fantasies prior to the advent of oil, he may have bought himself some space to roam.  But with that first discovery, and many since, Guyana is not the old sleepy, backwater hamlet that it used to be for centuries.

Today, there are flocks of ambassadors and advisers and agents representing Wall Street, Washington, and whatchamacallit.  They come from anywhere and everywhere.  Though the US Ambassador, Excellency Nicole D. Theriot has been more silent than a nun sequestered in a convent, she must be appalled.  If anybody knows the depths of Guyanese realities, it would be the US ambassador (police, corruption, law, inclusivity, justice…).  In addition to her, there are the British and Canadian and Indian High Commissioners, who are not blindfolded, nor do they need hearing aids.  I believe that their minds are in fine working order.  So, when they absorb President Ali bristling with hostility at his own people or overflowing with highfaluting rhetorical detonations about democracy and inclusion, they must be asking themselves: what is it that we have here.  A slight correction is in order: it is more of what is it that Guyanese have dropped in their laps and hanging over their heads.

Taking in all this, there is a painful flashback that still unsettles me.  Painful because it is so embarrassing, how a man who was no dunce humiliated himself by his inseverable connection to a fantasy world of his own making.  His name was Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf and his lair of operations was Bunker Iraq.  His verbal antics and unbelievable posture(s) earned him two nicknames from the foreign press that was always ready with a moniker that fits.  The first was Baghdad Bob, while the second was Comical Ali.  The bombs were raining from the skies, the fires were burning all over Baghdad, but there he was with his verbal productions that aligned overblown political rhetoric with the best of comedy screenplays.  There are no Americans here, insisted Baghdad Bob.

The Americans have turned tail and hightailed it back to Fort Benning.  The long and short of it was that the man made a global spectacle of himself, the butt of jokes from Birmingham to Beijing.  Should our own dear President Mohamed Irfaan Ali keep barreling his way down the road that he has chosen as his exclusive zone of operation, there is the high risk that he could be categorized similarly, and no less disdainfully.  Part of my concern is whether this is already what prevails in Guyana’s resident diplomatic community.  And not to forget its ballooning foreign investment community that swarms here and hangs onto to every word coming from Guyana’s president.

The oil has made that possible, and I implore the president to be responsible.  He is free to live inside his bubble, but somebody must have the onions to whisper to him to do so in private.  I am ready to look the other way and give the president leeway in his being such a split political personality.  But he should really be sensitive and discipline himself to tamp down on what has morphed into his regular histrionics.  Which Guyanese would be proud when their president gets so transported to some unknown realm that he loses touch with reality?  Repeatedly.  Recklessly.  President Ali may fancy himself to be Guyana’s 21^st century equivalent of Pontius Pilate of Biblical fame: “what I have said, I have said.”  Spoken like a Roman governor with subjects strewn at his feet.  President Ali must be more than a national governor.  He must learn to govern himself in a manner that attaches more closely to the full truths of where Guyana is.  A leader isn’t a theater operator.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)                       

(Concerned about the president)

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• Concerned about the president, Guyana’s Mr. Unreality., old-time Persian palace, President Ali

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