Profiles in leadership, Nigel, ah, Nigel

Jul 19, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – Once, the man was a rising star.  C.A. Nigel Hughes, Esq., was.  Then his star took a dive.  Politically, not legally.  Has anybody seen Nigel recently?  Who is the last Guyanese that heard from him, of him?  What could have gone wrong, who gummed up the pipes?  From potential liberator to distant stranger, it has been a hard, swift, sharp descent.

The tools and assets were all there.  A new kind of leader, a possibility.  Then the odds went south, got all mucked up.  Number one, was the first issue; then how to divide.  Hairsplitting led to the hair-raising with enthralled Guyanese watching.  Watching, but not believing.  That’s not leadership.  That’s gamesmanship.  A little bit of craftsmanship, too; along some crassness also.  I say it again: there can be no chattering about shared governance at the national level, when there is so much difficulty splitting at the internal level.  What didn’t yet exist.  Leadership of a rare order was needed, summoned.  The bell went unheard and unanswered.

If Mr. Hughes didn’t know it, somebody on his side had to prevail.  The people are watching.  They are waiting for someone, a leader to be trusted, to walk with them.  For the longest while, Guyanese have walked alone.  It is a lonely road, take it from me; traveled only by those with the fortitude of a certain kind of constitution.  More Guyanese don’t want to walk with the president, or the former president.  Mr. Hughes had that slightest of small openings.  The law overtook his head, redirected his energies.  He had gotten his hands full, from Houston, East Bank Demerara to Houston, TX.  It’s a big world.  One that, unfortunately, didn’t leave the kind of room for the priorities and pains of Guyanese.  Theirs was to live with the profanities of powers local and foreign.

What I table is what Nigel Hughes should have been standing on the highest, biggest local table, and representing the Guyanese people with his all.  Oh, he had it all, then came the political fall.  Now he has slowed to a crawl.  I don’t feel for this brother, for he is strong enough to go on by himself.  I feel for Guyanese, who now study the terrain in front of them, and weigh their choices.  Norton or Mohamed?  The new Mohamed or the older one, which is a running national joke.  Because the older one is Bharrat Jagdeo.  It is the tumultuous tale of how leadership unfolds, upends, in this country.  To turn an old thing on its head, what should be a nine is not even a six.  Where one national leader is concerned, a nine is as close to zero, as one could get.  Just complete and attach the end of the nine and, ergo, the result is a zero.  Isn’t this what Guyanese have been compelled to live with, a public farce, with a difference.  Lots of noise, mucho bravado.

Because of the above circumstances, of square, puffed-up balloons stuffed into cone hats, this was where Hughes had to rise.  Rise above himself.  Rise in lockstep with Guyanese.  Rise for Guyana.  The shipment of yeast got held up in the US, somewhere close to Port Galveston.  Galveston, oh Galveston, I think I hear Glenn Campbell.  I still hear her sea winds blowing….  Dark and foul winds have blown over Guyana for many an unending decade.  But never as dark and as foul as the last half-decade.  Whither did thou disappeareth, C.A. Nigel Hughes?  Guyana has that kind of need.  A country calls.  A citizenry cries.  It was and is the worst time to take that long walk, to fade into the ether.

To give an idea of how putrid and vulgar the leadership of Guyana has become, consider the environment.  The leadership used to employ and deploy Guyanese to do their dirty deeds for them, demonize other citizens.  Now they go several rungs deeper into the gutter: they recruit foreigners to drive daggers into the necks of their fellow Guyanese.  Their once best of friends, now denounced as the worst of national enemies, traitors.  Who needs, could ever have any use, for leaders of such grand designs, that kind of slippery caliber?  There are Guyanese who do.  They can have them.

When Guyanese need heroes, they are left to contend with cons, impersonators, blubberers.  When it is that hour when Guyanese are in need of self-sacrificing leaders, they get those who sacrifice them at the altar of foreign devils.  I retrieved that one from the celestial Chinese.  I don’t think anymore of where Guyana should be.  I think of what to do with what Guyanese have.  For a brief moment Guyanese had Nigel Hughes fully on their side, or thought that they did.  Until, they found out how wrong they were, actually didn’t.

(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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• AFC, GHK Lall, Guyana Elections, Nigel Hughes

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