David Granger surfacing, sighting

May 25, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

Hard Truths…

By GHK Lall

 Kaieteur News- In recent times, there has been sightings of former President David Granger.  A former national army head, and former head of state, is sure to have much to offer, lay before Guyanese, notwithstanding the bitter wounds to be licked.  He has spoken of coalition issues.  That’s a safe subject, a family matter best resolved away from the public, with a firm hand from him.  In characteristic fashion, Excellency Granger has shrunk from that duty.  It is a duty, for one does not abandon his army when the tide turns, no matter how much could be said of giving the survivors free rein to chart their own course.

The role of eminence grise has its virtues.  Its own pulling and coalescing powers, which ought not to have been abandoned.  Especially when it is clear that the ship is leaking and listing.  What else could be said of the party that he distanced from post March or August 2020, thus robbing it of that steering hand when it was most needed.  From my long distance and limited perspective, I believe that Mr. Granger’s coolness (some would say aloofness) to the welfare of his troops didn’t serve them well, was not his most wholesome hour.  Look at where the group is today, and look at the daunting mountain at which it stares.  Last, look at the opportunities that go flying past, without so much as a comprehensive and convincing effort to latch on to them, if only a handful of those once-in-a-political lifetime opportunities.

In addition to coalition matters, Excellency Granger has expressed his thoughts, even his tactful discomfort, at the governance issues that lay this country low.  When Guyana was at its poorest, it wasn’t this mentally impoverished, this governmentally destitute.  I should add depraved and diabolically so, but today is a day that calls for the best in spiritual gentility.  Oftentimes, softer words travel longer distances, and farther faster.  Relative to national governance issues, and I invite-or challenge, as circumstances demand-any Guyanese to give me a hand by identifying what is going right and doing well in this country.  Call the name of the Guyana Police and Guyanese run for shelter wherever they can find it.  Say a word that has some relationship to the presidency, and citizens ask themselves what they have done to deserve this calamity.  A calamity that, I must emphasize, has done the impossible.  It has spiraled into national crisis territory.  Lest no one lose sight of where I direct attention, I repeat: it is the Guyana presidency.  If ever there was a bag of rotting onions that oozes worms, it’s the presidency of this country at this time.  LFS Burnham at his deplorable worst, would have had cause to be envious.  Because Mr. Granger has graced that rarest of rare Guyanese summits, including ingloriously, he has working knowledge of what goes on there, and how those interfere with Guyanese peace of mind.  Their economic viability, too.  In other words, if there is one former president of this ill-fated Republic, who has been close to the weaknesses and woefulness that can attach to the presidency-hence extended governance-it is David Arthur Granger, soldier, spoiler, and now speaker of truths.

Coalition issues and governance gaps are fertile territory for Mr. Granger to plant his feet and flag.  But there is that grandaddy of all issues that Excellency Granger must focus on, address head on.  Before I could say oil, he ought to already have arrived there.  However oil is, that’s where Guyana is.  As oil goes, so goes governance.  It’s as simple and as sophisticated as those two constructs.  Mr. Granger has an obligation to speak about oil, and I call on him, respectfully so, without putting any ideas in his head, regarding what should be the order of his priorities.  Oil is king and queen and crown prince.  Maybe even Queen Mother also.  It is where Guyana is.

Mr. Granger may wish to give oil wide berth, given the developments of October 2016, and how those have trapped Guyanese since.  Oil is everything, is in everything, given the influences it wields.  A country is enslaved, a whole leadership cabal pays prostrated homage at its altar.  And sitting above all Guyanese, is its haughty member of the Yankee Confederacy, the one worshipped as if some sacred deity.  Yankee Confederacy may ring wrong with Guyanese purists, but I place this before them: one is about money, the other into slavery.  Economic slavery is worse than the physical one.  A contract can be just as crippling as the chattel variety.  When a national government standing atop national sovereignty cannot unlock its mind, and open its mouth, then those governance items must feature most prominently on Mr. Granger’s menu.

Some Guyanese leaders are in dire need of rehabilitation.  Oil castrates them badly, very publicly.  Since David Granger broke his long silence, he now has this long road ahead of him.  Oil is the tentacle that, like a heat seeking missile, reaches for, and latches onto, anything and everything in its path.  Those sitting on the sidelines hoping to be spared, cannot avoid being ensnared by its irresistible power.  I yield the floor to Mr. Granger.  A threshing floor rests in his hands.

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

---

---