Floor crossings, faithful getting passed over

Jul 26, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – The spotlight has been on people moving from one house to another.  AFC to PNC.  PNC to PPP.  PNC to WIN.  The PPP smarties move to the bank and the front of the line.  Preferred customers, those with the biggest bank accounts and bigger bankrolls receive that kind of priority treatment.  Moving has involved from Amanza to Dawn, Juretha to James, scaling fences, or crossing formerly forbidden floors.

Congratulates to them all for the freest exercise of their constitutional and democratic rights.  May not agree, but I advocate.  Before proceeding, let there be remembrance of Richard who moved smartly and at high velocity to that highest trajectory.  All the way to Caracas.  But, being a man for the underdog, I seek to shift the focus from those moving to those who had to move and make space for the influx of movers and crossers.  The movers have shaken up the dancefloors of the PPP and PNC particularly.

Prior to the people moving in, there were those who toiled and served faithfully, bided their time, paid their dues, and hoped for their moment under the sun.  When Richard made his long-anticipated move from Burnham Court to the Jagdeo Jamboree, what he did was displace some veteran, proven PPP loyalist.  C’est la vie!  There is a plaster for that one.  What is best for the team.  A bit of Jagdeo’s kind of patented revenge: send an enemy into the lion’s den.  King David did that with Uriah in the Old Testament.  Look, it’s not quite the Communist Manifesto.  Just think, though, of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and his timeless ‘revenge is a banquet best served frozen’.  And rancid, too.  Healthy for the psyche of some people I understand.  Jagdeo is one.

Dawn wrote herself a ticket that has WIN smeared all over it, and off she went.  Imagine that, a PNC champ, now a champ for WIN.  The optics and dynamics are appealing.  So also, the word from the oracles, assorted tea leaves, and bat livers.  But though Dawn may see herself (rightly) as Aurora, there must be some aspirant from the interior that she sent over those rapids that take no prisoners.  Oh well, all is fair in love, war, and politics.  Apologies for the duplication, since war and politics are the same thing in Guyana.  People get in the way, the faithful become expendable, real soldiers get hurt.

Mervyn Williams is a case in point.  A first son of the soil in the far sands of Guyana.  A former PNC MP.  A man who has been around as long as the paint and grass.  Where is he these days?  I checked in the ranks of the PPP, and he is not there.  Full disclosure: I met Mervyn Willams a time or two; a learning experience.  Whatever became of Williams?  I used to see him in the same room, by the new chief’s elbow, from the stream of pictures posted here and there.  He may have had to make way for the newcomer, the prime minister in waiting, formerly with an AFC address.  Politics does have its refugees, and in the eyes of leaders, they are sometimes disposable.  I would hope that Williams still has a place at the table.  It would send a serious message to his folks back in the grasslands and hinterlands.  Some soldiers get medals.  Some get something else.  Check this one out for its weight.  A pat on the back, it must be remembered as the matter of a few inches from a boot in the behind.

It is one of the reasons that the closest I get to politics is through the newspapers, or the tube every now and then.  Like the man in the black hat said: a man has got to know his limitations.  Can anyone see me in the same room with Bharrat Jagdeo?  Of course, I would shake his hands, even if that means I have to do so looking down.  But what I may be compelled to whisper into his face could send him out of politics, and all the way to Outer Mongolia.  He could write his memoirs there, which I assure all Guyanese wouldn’t have one word of what I shared with him.  Self-protection.

In politics, people move and people get in the groove.  Politics is painful.  I reserve moving and grooving for the dance floor and Kool and the Gang (Cherish the love).  I think that Guyanese politicians need to put a little love in their hearts, get some love in their lives.  None more than Bharrat and the president.  Real love.  Not the love that money can buy, to turn the Beatles on their heads.  When politicians move, they create displacement.  Centrifugal forces are unleashed, some damage done.  The waiting, hoping, end up losing.

(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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• faithful, Floor crossings, GHK Lall, PNC, PPP

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