Presidential talking up

Dec 03, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – Stabroek News can be nuanced.  A white glove smoothing the cheek.  “Ali talks up logistics consortiums” (SN, Nov 30, 2025).  Talks up is to sell, to market; no p-word in response to that Sunday caption.  What do I hear here?

I hear a president who loves to talk, fell in love with the sounds emerging.  Sounds.  I search through the sounds for the whole story, the unsaid real one.  What may be masked behind the big talk fest.  Pres. Ali must be given his due.  He talks up a storm on most things, and thereafter he starts to taper off.  A little substance would help.  I ease up, as there is another week, before his second hundred days are over.  But a little reminder or two may be of use to the president, if only there’s listening.

Logistics consortiums, Guyana needs them.  Progress.  Now, there is this great wealth that makes so much possible, including generating the interest of consortiums, and then luring them here.  They don’t need too much encouragement.  But the oil wealth itself is over our heads, out of our sights, and not in our hands.  Pres. Ali and Vice Pres. Jagdeo have acknowledged that on several occasions.  Exxon rules the oil waters, and dictates to those elected by Guyanese to speak for them.  Deposits in that New York bank is the reward.  Reminds me of bolts of cloth, and bottles of firewater, in exchange for millions of slaves.  Guyana has little to no control of its patrimony, the inheritance of its peoples.  Guyana doesn’t even know the full extent of what it has out there.  But it sails merrily along in swooning step to such platitudes as ‘monetization’ and the flattery of being a great and willing partner in Exxon’s oil consortium.

Now I hear Pres. Ali talking up logistics consortium.  Good on the face of it.  But what lies underneath?  What about the downside, as represented by the fine print, and that which is not printed at all?  It is what Excellency Ali for all of his talking, and talking up, feigns not being too concerned about.  How about handing over another limb, or several more of them, to helpers who flock here from all directions?  Logistics consortiums is the comforting name that is fashionable nowadays.  I suppose that the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria would have sheltered under logistics consortiums, if they were so inclined, five hundred years ago.  Like the Romans of Caesar’s lore, consortiums come, see, conquer.  The story of time and of man.  Some see drug boats on the high seas.  I see the extending of power, and the loss of control.

Recall I said some sentences ago that Exxon and company control the oil.  Now the feeder systems are being welcomed to erect their control towers in a prostrate Guyana that is open for any kind of business that prospers others, while leaving a bunch of citizens where they have always been trapped and locked.  At the bottom.  On the outs.  In the barren wildernesses.  In the fastnesses of a country that has almost every gift known to man, including nature’s generosity in the sparing of its worst wraths.  I ponder what will be left, is left, for this country to oversee.  Logistics like lice, but Guyana is in such a hobbled state that it can’t even deliver the results of a census, now over three years old.  More logistics, and the logistics of the minds stand as a stumbling block to accessing basic information about how the business of the people is being run by the big people that the small people put into office to deliver little things of that nature.  In a season of logistics consortiums, Guyanese somehow always end up the losers.

Still, Pres. Ali talks up.  He has gotten so good at talking up, that he believes that the world revolves around what he says, and nothing else matters.  I humbly recommend that he pauses with the talking up, and listen to the echoes that deafen Guyanese.  He may not like what he hears, nor like what those logistics ultimately mean for Guyanese.  Guyana as a sovereign nation that is a servant nation, a subjugated polity.  The British had their East India Company and viceroys in India.  Pres. Ali celebrates their 21^st century equivalents -logistics consortiums.  Since Guyana doesn’t know what to do with its newfound wealth, there are those only too glad to guide Guyanese on doing so.  Elections are left for Guyanese to own and control, in their efforts to make Guyana great again.

(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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• Ali, GHK Lall, logistics consortiums, President, talking up

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