Miracles at midday

Oct 16, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

---

(Kaieteur News) – Minister turned adviser, Cde. Robeson Benn held the line, took all the bad raps with a smile, and grimace, as the situation demanded.  The party must not be made to suffer, look pathetic.  He took it on the shin, on the chin.  How he still managed to spin remains a mystery to me.  After bending from heavy lifting, holding the line, and taking those hard blows, enter the lady in red and attired in Prada, Vera, and Balenciaga.  She gets all the credit.  I tell everybody, life just isn’t fair.

Fields burnt.  Hundreds of millions, close to a half billion, gone up in flames.  What a waste!  How much of it really did?  All this in the small span of two weeks.  Oh, and most conspicuously days after the elections that were supposed to be a lightning bolt, but which was a dismal deadbolt.  Sure, there were some excitements caused by departures from the regular script, but nothing threatening.  The standby Commonwealth Force took care of any September surprises.  It is why I like this country.

There is always a contingency ready to deal with any menacing reality.  But, back to those torched fields, and a question jumps up impatiently -Hello up there! why not before the elections?  Oh, the private sector demographic would have been peeved.  Business impeded.  Who cares about lost business, since that could always be recovered, above the table or under it?  But somebody had to care about lost votes and the contributions that those represented.  There was no way that chances would be taken.  Talk about sensitivity, and attention to detail, there they were.  Now since the elections are over, it is time for business.  Cleaning of some houses, and showing citizens that it is a different time, and the sheriffs, some new, many old, have been given their marching orders.  Fields burning make for a grand media event.  A thought intruded, and it takes right back to sugar.

Cane fields were burned for two reasons, probably more.  Burnt cane is sweeter, they say.  And a burnt cane field send the snakes and rodents rushing for the nearest escape route.  I trust that Guyanese like the picture that is emerging with those fields burnt by the Guyana Police Force.  Like cane fields when burnt, the leftover product is sweeter.  Now, who in official Guyana would be so uncivilized, so not with the program, as not want to taste?  The longer and deeper the better. After all, it is a crime in itself to incinerate over $400 million worth of mind balms, and spirit soothers, and not collect a sample.  Me, I am sticking to Vicks Inhalers.  Don’t forget that second byproduct that was part of burning cane fields as part of the prep work for the next steps.  Get rid of the bad guys (rodents and reptiles), and have the whole place for self.  Put differently, the field is available for a sweeping tour and engaging in different levels of self-help.  It is that old maxim at work again, only on this occasion it is reverses: when the rats are runoff, it is time for the cats to takeover.  It’s meow time.

This is too good to be true, like so many other things in Guyana.  If the weeks since the best elections in Guyana (for the incumbents) have delivered so much, I find myself weighing what is the next area of national concern and agitation that could be in for a good, ole, period of attention and correction.  Men with jukeboxes and boomboxes had better watch out.  Something tells me that they could be the next set of donors and contributors targeted.  No more beating around the bush to make comforting noises intended to drown out the complaints about noise nuisance.  It is now a national scourge, in the manner and dangers of domestic violence.  Come to think of it, there might be a connection that links the two.

First, there was the big hullabaloo having to do with an anticorruption drive.  Meets with my full approval, if genuine.  Second, there were all those fields smoked out of existence.  On paper, it is a wonderful development.  Keep the minds of youths clear.  But what about on the ground?  That is, what rich gems, and how much worth of them were left in the ashes, untouched by the blazes that razed down to the ground?  Now I keep my eyes peeled for improvements relative to lawlessness on the roads, and ears pinned for the level of sound coming from all over.  Rome wasn’t built in a day.  But some people in Guyana are tearing down what they built-up in five years, within that 24-hour cycle that eluded the Romans.  Romans had their Golden Age.  Guyanese now absorb their action age.

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

---

• GHK Lall, midday, miracles, Robeson Benn

---