Post-Thanksgiving and pre-Xmas for Ex Ali and VP Jagdeo

Dec 24, 2025 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

(Kaieteur News) – Any Guyanese, or anyone else, who believes that I am against the PPP, PNC, AFC, WIN or FGM is in urgent need of a psychiatrist’s couch.  Whoever is in charge has to deliver, with Guyanese getting the best out of them.  When any of the political parties just named is for what is most beneficial to all Guyanese, then I am for them.

No one can come between me and them, nor influence me to stand against them.  For when they are about the best in honest leadership, about what is consistently trustworthy, then clean governance is a foregone conclusion.  In the bag, done and delivered.  I single out Excellency Ali and Vice Pres. Jagdeo for special mention, and what I consider a timely post-Thanksgiving, pre-Xmas, and early New Year’s gift.  It is wrapped this way.

Do not look Drs. President and VP at the small cohort of Guyanese conscientious objectors, free speech apostles, independent thinkers, genuine civil society hands, and patriotic nationalists, and dismiss them as an army of deviationists and undesirables.  They are as Guyanese as any, more than most, and are united in a single thought: what is needed from leaders and government, so that there is a better Guyana, the best that can be?  Hence, there is no basis to see them as outlaws; they are more law-abiding than the greatest majority in the PPP, Messrs. Ali and Jagdeo.  I throw down a gauntlet.  There are some citizens of this Republic, who are more law-abiding than the most senior presences in this country.

Those who are outspoken should not qualify for despised outlaw status.  For emphasis, Friars Ali and Jagdeo: It shouldn’t follow reflexively that those who are not for, are against.  Life is neither that binary, nor Manichean.  Personally, I like being a Christian capitalist nationalist.  All should breathe easier.  On the other hand, whoever has a problem with that, just condemned themselves to a lifetime of self-torture, and mental disconnections from the better things in life.  Hold this close: there are those who are for one thing, and one vision, only, -a better Guyana.  where even the penniless widow and the fatherless wastrel are held as special citizens.  And a conscientious one seen as an extraordinary one, who will not be cowed; and who doesn’t need to be coddles.

In taking another tack, I present a little history lesson.  The more that democracy and leadership rule draw closer and closer to tyranny, the more there are some citizens, who stand up and speak searingly that what is going on is oppressive and repressive.  Sakharov and Solzhenitsyn did so in the USSR; King did it in the US; Rodney did it in Guyana.  Earnest men do not start out thinking that they will end up heroes.  Or dead.  But they will stand and fight for what they believe is right.  It’s universal, not racial.  It is the unconquerable human, not purchasable partisan passion.  The sooner that Drs. Ali and Jagdeo can get a grip on that, the sooner that they should be able to discern that they will not succeed in driving an entire nation into a quivering wreck.  People have genuine concerns about the integrity of leadership, the quality of the government that they live with, and these are convictions that ought not to be stuffed into the prism of politics, but where they rightly belong.  That is, in the call of civics, the call of country, and the duties that are attached.  It’s instinctive for a few.

There are those who resist living like worms under the boot of oppressors.  Those who refuse to live like dogs forced to behave themselves and wait for a loose bone.  Chew on this.  There are those who are deeply ensconced in the Ali-Jagdeo camp, but because there is so much that is not being done right, certain developments trickle to the street.  What to make of them?  Deviants from the house line?  Traitors to the cause, regardless of how ill-conceived, ill-enforced, and ill-fated?  Nobody did jump ship.  But, after a time, they cannot live with their consciences, or face their children, or kneel before their god anymore.  A few, only a mere handful, begin to hate who they have become, despise the life they live.  A cabal that is held together by conspiracy and crimes can only last so long.  Even the most locked down, the most secret of societies, like the Vatican, the Theocracy in Teheran, and the Freemasons, have had their adherents who fell out, and walked off.  How many are going to be blocked to stop the flow?  Whether Robert Calvi, or Adnan Khashoggi, or Navalny.

I say it softly.  Guyanese see through the smokescreens, distortions, exaggerations.  Some speak up.  Learn to live with them, Dr. Pres, Dr. VP. It’s the only way.

(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, Jagdeo, PNC, PPP, Thanksgiving, XMAS

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