Look where Guyana is, govt. is, leaders are

Jan 11, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

 Kaieteur News-  President Irfaan Ali and Vice President Bharat Jagdeo, both doctors, are so far along the road that they have selected, it is astonishing where they find themselves.  They should be taking the lead in helping this nation, healing the hurts of its people.  Instead, they are overjoyed at taking the opposite tack.  All are worse, with none in a more pathetic state than the two of them.  Some examples should help all Guyanese get a better understanding of both men, see them for who they really are.

When Ali and Jagdeo hear of conscience, the first things that come to their minds are comets and cockroaches.  It is not that these fellows lack education, simply that they have no range, so narrow their world is.  So, it follows that when they hear of this strangest of alien creatures, a Guyanese who is a bona fide conscientious objector, they don’t know what to do with him, and they don’t know what to do with themselves.  One resorts to brimstone and blabber, the other seeks solace in the bludgeon and battleaxe.  In their minds, such a Guyanese is of a lower life form than the cabal in Caracas plotting to separate Guyanese from their land and treasure.  Pity the local chaps, it is all that they know, what they have been allowed to get away with, and what they believe and insist should be the prevailing culture.

Talk to them about the place of ethics in government and they react as though they just encountered a Martian.  To complete the circle, when they hear or come across an honest citizen, he or she is their worst nightmare.  What if there are more like this one?  How many more could there be, since one alone is too dangerous?  When they hear that some Guyanese is about honesty, they start imagining what their worst enemy would look like.  On getting the news that they are few in number and do not represent much of a political threat, they then go into high gear to snuff them out and stuff them into one of those foreign owned radioactive waste deposit sites.  Drs. Ali and Jagdeo should be leading the way in rolling out the red carpet to welcome principled Guyanese, who must be a vital part of any genuine capacity building vision.  Instead, look at the rings of suspect characters, with which they seem most comfortable.  I urge Guyanese to recall any full-length horror or crime movie that they have seen.  Most of the men and women around Drs. Ali and Jagdeo are of a darker character than those nocturnal Gothic delights.  With few exceptions, a slate of scoundrels, if anyone asks me.  Who is injecting whom, and with what medicine, are the enduring mysteries.  A fact of life is that there could usually be a small handful of unscrupulous members in a group of a few dozen or so.  But it boggles the mind that over 90 percent of groups around Messrs. Ali and Jagdeo would never win prizes for ethics, morals, and standards.  If anyone wants to locate the thickest cluster of dishonest people in this country, all they have to do is make the rounds of the top offices in this country.  How does anyone get anywhere in building a country with human materials of this abysmal quality?

The Chinese have a saying: if there is the desire to assist a man to feed himself, teach him how to fish.  In Guyana, the PPP created its smelly half-brother: because the objective is to control a man mind, body and soul, then give him a self-renewing license to steal.  First, he can’t protest about anything.  Nor can he blow whistles before law enforcement people (themselves no fine kettle of fish) or media.  Third, there is a slave for life, with a sword hanging over his head and his sleep.  Who is going to report whom, when the corrupt is the biggest component in the dominant culture?  Who are the disgruntled and the totally fed-up (sudden flash of conscience) going to spill the beans to, when they have their own tortured histories?  This is how Guyana is under almost near complete lockdown, thanks to the boys in red.

It explains why there is all this verbal sparring, this leadership rhetorical shifting from foot to foot.  It is to buy time.  It is why nobody squeals, why the machinery doesn’t squeak.  It is to provide cover for some proven ole comrade.  It is to send a message through the 83,000 square miles of Guyana: the PPP takes care of its own.  From death row candidates to solitary confinement inmates.  Like that old Jamaican favorite from back in the day used to remind everyone: stick by me and I’ll stick by you.  That part of the PPP manifesto is written in invisible ink.  Prying eyes and inquiring minds come up empty.  PPP luminaries are assured of universal backing from the big office to the big stationhouse to the big people there who get their marching orders from the big people in the big PPP Government.  All this is neither imaginary nor hallucinatory.  It is all reality based.

(Look where Guyana is, govt. is, leaders are)

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