Profiles in leadership – the president first

Jul 14, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Kaieteur News – Profiles in Leadership is a 5-part effort. From a contributor and servant, not comrade, not partisan. Called and written, as seen, interpreted. All Guyana gets to decide. The president is first.

The president started out beautifully. All the right things said. He hasn’t really stopped, other than for some stray moments when the real man, the real leader, escaped from inside of him. If ever there was a president of Guyana who could promise and promise, it is the incumbent of the last five years. Promise is the father of production.

The foremost national leader on paper has been pleased to be first a motion picture producer, then an actor. Actors read lines handed to them, move on to the next performance. When there is no applause, no award, they imagine hearing both in the set recesses of their thinking. What has the president delivered?

I repeat the question: what has this president of 2020-2025 given to the Guyanese people? From their record budgets. From so much drawn out of their oil savings. From the borrowing and spending on steel and cement. There are ribbons of roads (infrastructures). There are flocks of foreign investors (come hither….).

There are gallons and galleons of oil (Exxon) gushing out of Guyana’s now sacred seas. I thank the president of Guyana for his efforts; profusely, too. Because of these three lynchpins (record budgets, foreign investments, oil) of his presidency, Guyanese should be better, healthier, happy, then happier. Are they? From those three only. The president should be a figure of inspiration, one inciting trust, for there is that indefinable quality: believability. Does he?

Respectfully, I remove those Guyanese who support the opposition from this part of the contribution, and for the moment only. Is the president trusted by his own people? The poor ones. The older ones. The younger ones with families. I take the bit in my teeth -the president has not. For the already rich and well-positioned yes, indeed. For the poor and left behind, that’s another story.
They look around and ask themselves, how could they be falling farther behind in a country with this kind of wealth. In a time, when Guyanese are the envy of the world. In an era, when money floods this country from different sources more than the rains of the last few months.

Since December, as someone represented to me recently. These Guyanese at the bottom, below the middle, are the citizens that stand as the test case for the commendations or condemnations due the president. When the Guyanese from the opposition are reintroduced into the mix of poverty and expectation, of plenty money and heavy anxiety, the president’s record goes from damning to detonating.

The president has the greatest program marching under the sweetest banner: National Development Priorities. America’s FDR had his New Deal. JFK had his New Frontier. Guyana’s president has his New Maneuver. Or New Sweetener. I serve the menu. Guyanese get to select. Now this brings me to this damning business of what has been happening with the people’s money.

All of it, under the camouflage of national development priorities. Here is the troubling issue that gives away the president, exposes his hindquarters. The World Bank doesn’t have the kind of stats that it needs to provide a picture of where matters stand in Guyana. Six years after the last poverty report, the World Bank is empty-handed, and not for lack of interest, or trying.
When stats that favor, or those that could be manipulated by helpers, speak so glowingly of these billions and those other billions used here and over there, it is bewildering that what would lend credence to the World Bank’s energies is in such short supply.

It is to the president’s discredit that, despite his wash of words, the rash of numbers, Guyanese are grappling with what is their true food inflation rate (inflation itself, also), their real unemployment rate, and their real census numbers. If not those, then of what good are all the others? I pinpoint the once-in-a-while welfare payment delivered under the costume of cash grant.

The president as trustee decided on that allowance for the underaged children. More to the detriment of the president’s record was how Guyanese ran over each other in many places to get their hands on that $100,000. It should have told the president what the world reeled from: the richest people in the richest country in the world were that desperate for a dollar. How about that for an irrefutable statistic!

Regarding where much of the hundreds of billions budgeted over the last five years went, I have a two-word answer for the president: unexplained wealth. He knows where he should start before progressing to ministers and public servants. Since the Speaker of the National Assembly banned the c word from parliament. I obey. Mr. President, sir: I see a presidency in disarray, a leader grievously wounded by his own hand. Blessings, dear leader. Next up, Mr. Aubrey Norton.

(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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• Guyanese, leadership, President, Profiles

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