No wheeling and dealing on Venezuela – Ali

Jan 16, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

(Kaieteur News) – “Guyana will not strike a deal with the US to settle border controversy with Guyana” (Demerara Waves, Jan 10-2026).  Six years ago, President Irfaan Ali would have grabbed my attention and gotten my vote of confidence.  Six years later, any belief that once flickered has long gone dead.

Like so many other Guyanese, I have learned the hard way that Excellency Ali is a leader who thrills in making bright, appealing speeches, but smirks when he disowns the gauntlets he threw down before, turns his back on what he announced with trumpets’ blasts.  There has been Edward the Confessor, William the Conqueror, and now Irfaan the Speechmaker (but vanisher and non-deliverer).

When I read of ‘no deal with the US on the Guyana-Venezuela border controversy,’ the first reaction was: not again, Mr. President.  Heard things like that before.  There was transparency, which has turned out to be Dr. Ali’s commitment to secrecy and the secretive.  If the leader cannot authorise the Office of the Commissioner of Access to Information to release government information to petitioning citizens, then what can he deliver, other than more and bigger promises?  Wheeling and dealing now struck out on the border controversy is one.  I believed that Pres. Ali would deliver something, any little something, to back up his promise about transparency and accountability, only to collide head-on with Exxon audit reports withheld, much more.  In my time, Guyanese would have said that such a character is a ‘boards maan.’  Today, Guyanese are fed a steady diet of Irfaan Ali the Showman.  In the US, they used to call such a creature, a carnival barker.  Lots of noise to attract listeners and nibblers.  But not much substance, only the streams of disappointment usually following.

The Great 2025 Cash Grant that was to be, but never was.  Remember?  The president etched his name in dismal ink that smears, through his promise repeatedly made to the Guyanese people, only to reach to a new low when he found humor in what he promised.  Goodbye to expectations generated.  Welcome to his failure to deliver.  What kind of leader mocks, laffs, at citizens, when they are hungry and struggling?  There is no spinning of that by the spinmeisters in the Office of the President.  Even if I put out my best effort on my best day, I couldn’t match that crassness, that descent into the ignominious.  I give to Guyanese a leader, their leader, who is gifted at making great promises, then transforming himself into a phantom that is elusive and abusive.

He says no deal with the US on the Venezuela-Guyana toxic soup.  I want to believe the president, but how can I when he has fallen short and failed to deliver so often?  It is a most unwholesome state not to see the credible in a president, but that choice was not mine to make.  It was the kind of shaky, undependable foundation that was laid by Pres. Ali over the years.  I thought that he would have made a better president than a minister.  Wrong again!  When the president should stand head and shoulders above his team of ministers and carry them.  He is indistinguishable from the pack; and, in fact, is carried along by them in some instances.

He promised an anticorruption czar.  He or she must be traveling from Mother Russia by paddle-powered canoe, should arrive here by 2030.  In time for the next elections, and a new set of promises from Irfaan the Speechmaker, then vanisher.  He promised to read the riot act on those peddling misinformation and disinformation, and a greater riot of those two monstrosities broke out.  Any testimony needed, and I am ready.  There was a time when I used to give Pres. Ali the benefit of the doubt.  That once generous credit bank has long run dry.  The president changes course and become a deliverer, and I become a believer.  Just give me something to hang onto; any lifeline from the president would do.  Indeed, I am that desperate.  For if a president amounts to one who is tantamount to a wake house storyteller, then that’s not making Guyana great.  It is making Guyana into the great global laughingstock.  All this oil, and all of this caliber of leaders.

The Guyana-Venezuela border controversy is sensitive and crucial enough for Pres. Ali to be given some space, some belief, some shoulder of support.  Unfortunately, I trusted my last card on Excellency Ali some time ago.  I lost, am still to recover.

(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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• border controversy, Essequibo, GHK Lall, Venezuela

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