Wanted-one campaign orator from any side

Jul 10, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – The times call for one.  Guyanese could do with one.  I look northward, southward, and all in vain.  Wanted: one political campaign orator.  It is at moments like these that I weigh that indefinable, intangible: what if….?  What if my ambitions were different?  I would nominate myself to be that longed for, much-needed, missing link: a political campaign speaker so desperately in demand in this country.

Let’s face reality.  Neither Nigel Hughes nor Aubrey Norton nor Bharrat Jagdeo nor the other citizen has the resplendent and transcendent gifts that separate primitive provincial politicians from oratorical and rhetorical masters.  Masters who make the language sizzle, the hair of their audiences stand on end.  It’s not sufficient to have a tidy, nifty vocabulary.  Helps, but not good enough.  There is that WOW factor, the oomph surge, that gives acceleration and builds momentum to culmination in majestic crescendos.  Along with just that right feathery touch that draws out the decent into a diminuendo. Those who have it, know how to milk every bar and every note to get the last echo out of it, and then some more.  Make the echoes ricochet, reverberate.  Recall Churchill, Cicero, John F.

Jagdeo can’t do it.  Too bland, too riddled with holes, too mangled by secrets.  The other fella, his partner, is all volume and nothing but the blast of a barrel clanging downhill.  Too one dimensional, too limited in range and intellectual profoundness.  Verbal brawling is not the fine art of campaigning.  It is cheap brawling, and nothing more, possibly less.

Norton doesn’t have it, and though an old street warhorse, again he is, like Jagdeo, fighting a losing battle with being too flat, and not being able to seize the openings and launch into that rarest of rare combinations.  A spellbinding orator who is also a majestic phrasemaker and incandescent inspirer.  Nigel Hughes, given his lengthy courtroom playground, comes closest to the mark.  But he also suffers from the same deficit, despite a rich command of the lingua franca: when to crossover from being a technician to a political campaign magician.  These guys work with a couple of handicaps.  They are neither poets nor preachers nor writers.  The visions of the night don’t come easily to them, and when a few do, they are still halting and slow at hitting the gaps and running to daylight.

It is that ability, that keen sensitivity, to discern the emotions of their listeners and then touch those as one would with a bowstring or a violin to tease them to pitch after pitch of rapture and ecstasy.  The key is that those carried to such states of delirious and delicious frenzy know that they are there, but not how they got there.  Undoubtedly, too many, maybe all of them, in the local political arena are too ashen faced, too wooden-minded, and too stiff lipped.  There isn’t too much of a spark in them, too little of that crackling streak of electricity that is a fusion of oratorical thunder and lightning.

Where is the best place to unleash that kind of power, if not on the political hustings, where anything goes?  What is the best issue-the most stomach churning, knee snapping, and mind bending-than cost-of-living, and how they took the oil money and made a killing, two killings in fact?  One for themselves, and the other for those in Guyana that they buried alive.  Who wants to hear about the dynamics of economics?  Why tell the people about surplus and scarcity, when they could be told about who is starving them?  Who is gorging themselves?  And who’s dissing them and treating them as if they are dogs?

If I am the PNC of Norton et al, there’s one question that must soar with a trumpeter’s refrain: who has starved and degraded and mocked Guyanese more in the last five years than the PPP?  Who have harmed the children?  Who have wounded the spirit?

If I am the PPP of Jagdeo and posse, the one line to be repeated over and over is: who wants to take a chance and risk five years of the PNC?  Who is so mad that they can be that bad?  That self-destructive?

Elections can be as easy as Sunday morning.  Or as blistering and unforgiving as the Artic tundra and African Sahara blended.  Those liking it light and easy can comfort themselves with prayer.  Those who prefer the heat and passion of pitched battle, the vitality of incendiary energy, then the campaign trail is the place for them to be.  No holds barred, no prisoners taken, and no quarter given.  Blood sport it is, but only for those who relish the taste of it.  The poster still hangs overhead: Wanted: One Orator, a campaign orator.  Not a prattler, but campaign orator.

(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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• Aubrey Norton, Bharrat Jagdeo, GHK Lall, Guyana Elections, Nigel Hughes

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