Security – Guyana needs it, pays for it

Apr 06, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

 Kaieteur News- There is that timeless saying:  Time catches up with everyone.  The watchword today is security.  National security.  Security of Guyana’s property.  Peace and security in our time.  I watch on as two leaders in the government tumble over each other to be Captain America and Mr. America.  It is my duty to present my brothers: President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali and Vice President Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo.  Today, they jostle each other for pride of place to be more American than me and Mr. Alistair Routledge.  It is all good, until I bring back yesterday.  There was yesterday, remember that, and there was that national matter of supreme significance.  It was the 2016 Exxon oil contract.

The public record will show that I had problems with that contract and questioned its cheap pricing.  But said that though it is not well-received, it is understood.  I used words like steep ‘insurance premium’ paid, and ‘blood money’ and, at its core, part of high-priced protection.  Dirt-cheap oil that will leave dirt-poor people poorer, if that can be contemplated.  From the side of the PPP, then the opposition, the reactions were strong and sharp and nonstop.  To hell with security, where is the money for this high-quality commodity?  The mockers and scoffers came in waves.  Damn the Exxon contract (it should be).  Damn the Coalition (so let it be).  Who gives a damn about the price of protection rackets run at the corporate level, with their silent national backing!  Today, there is this spectacle of tongues that were curled in scorn, now heralding and serenading security.  A once dirty word is revisited, looked at radically differently.  It’s cleaned up, and then perfumed for the benefit of Guyanese who can’t see through the deceptions, the double standard and new standard inspired by the need for security.  Before, it was that too much was surrendered for next-to-nothing in return.  Today, the PPP can’t surrender enough swiftly enough for security (and little enough).

When Guyanese start being about country and not comrades, there could be a better Guyana.  When politicians can be honest with themselves for once (just once) and put the people and their patrimony first, then Guyana may be able to get to some better place.  Look at the PNC and AFC, publicly battling over premature division of spoils before they even lift a single finger to lift the people.  Similarly, when the PPP (government and group) palaver about security, it is not so much about security, as about making the right call for America, so that its players have continuity in power.  Power is personal profit.  Power signifies being first at the trough, then controlling the guzzling of its riches.

I say it again.  The same thing that the APNU-AFC Coalition Government bartered the oil cheaply for, it is the exact same thing that the PPP bargained all of Guyana for: security.  National identity.  National existence.  The Coalition sold oil to Exxon, and Guyanese prosperity with it.  The PPP sold Guyana to America, and with that liberty, identity, and destiny all collapsed ignominiously.  Like Otis Redding, passionate soul legend of old, ‘I want security.’  But not at this price.  As much as I want security and America here more than any other, I want and I need the personal pride of being a truly free Guyanese, one who has some hand in self-determination and both the prosperity and destiny of this country.  Too much has been relinquished for too little; so little as to be negligible.  A way had to be found, with the matching courage to link the political and geopolitical and the strategic with the commercial.  Guyanese want security, but Guyanese also need and want more from Exxon for their patrimony.  For those who sit on their fannies and lecture about how the world doesn’t work so, I have this terse message for them:  Get a new head.  Find some guts.  Be a real man and woman.  Be a patriot with some flicker inside.  Of wisdom.  But more of courage, and care for those over whom they have been given charge.

They are not one kind of people, and then a small subset of them.  They are the rank and file of Guyana up and down the local oil ladder.  The mere consideration may be recoiled from as rankness by the empty suits in the PPP Government calling themselves leaders.  Every Guyanese want security, but it must not be on the condition of a new slavery, a new order in the local domain.  Political shells serving as national fronts for America.  Elections are coming up, and my point will be proved, regardless of who emerges as the winner.

When I hear the PPP flash and flare about security, I hear the PNC and AFC of several years before.  In 2016, security’s first demand was oil, and the Coalition submitted too quickly, too easily.  In 2025, security has one refrain: America wants Guyana.  America has gotten Guyana.  President Irfaan ‘Captain America’ Ali dances his joyful jigs, all too pleased with the flimsiness of his paltry return, while he served up a whole country on a platter.  And, there is Bharrat Jagdeo, the new Mr. USA, sweetened into ecstasy by visions of victory, for selling that he is the better local political partner to the Americans.  Both Ali and Jagdeo are now willing self-enslavers to the old Monroe Doctrine now being reengineered into the New Trump World Order.  A country, a country, for security.  And there was Ali.

(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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