A Speaker who found his oats, proved his salt once

Feb 11, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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(Kaieteur News) – I dug and searched long and hard.  It took travels to Great Britain and a journey of some four hundred years back in time to locate a parliamentary Speaker to match what is going on here in 21^st century democratic Guyana.  Right here in Guyana and its modern version of parliamentary democracy, there is the thoughtful, the fitful, and the colorful, Speaker Manzoor Nadir.

A man of name and level that are identical, and of that, there is nothing much left to say.  In Jolly Olde England, there was an earlier similar superstar Speaker, William Lenthall.  Like Guyana’s honourable Speaker, not much can be found that testifies to his idealisms, his mechanisms, or his dynamisms.  Both men of honour (not to be mixed up with the mafia vocabulary of homage to their own), though, could be said to possess all the graceful charm of a doorknob, and a rust encrusted one being the best specimen.

Speaker Lenthall did have one moment of inexplicable, immortal glory during his reign of approximately 20 years at the helm of the Long Parliament in the British Commons.  It has since overshadowed his spineless crawling and groveling before the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, when he trampled upon the Rump Parliament, and brought the proceedings to an untimely and inglorious end.  I share what follows for the edification of all Guyanese, but most of all Guyana’s Honourable Speaker of the House, the now peerless and illustrious, Manzoor Nadir.

King Charles I arrived in parliament accompanied by hundreds of armed men.  He was intent on seizing five MPs he believed were bent on upending him.  Thanks to a hurried word from the French Ambassador, the wanted quintet (John Pym, John Hampton et al) had already made good their escape.  The king was not about to be thwarted.

“Mr. Speaker, I must for a time make bold with your chair.”  Thus, seated in a sea of stillness, the impatient, increasingly infuriated royal head asked the question of the hour: “Where are they?”

What followed from Speaker Lenthall has since made its way into legend.  I trust that Guyana’s own dear and erstwhile Speaker Nadir is reading slowly, listening carefully.  If he isn’t, then one of his staff should, and share with him.

Lowering one knee, and delivering a small curtsy, said Speaker William Lenthall: “May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak to this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here.”  The message, the point of honour, the piece de resistance, is that whether dictated by king or president or whatever earthly power there may be, there comes a time when a man has just got to be a man.  A man of courage, however rare and tentative; however temporary.  A man of constitutional conscience, and not some cowardly lackey to royalty, some crawling-on-the-belly canine ever at the ready to the bidding of some vacuous, grimy puffed-up potentate.  To kowtow before the wishes of some sleazy political mandarins whose nauseating odors overwhelm their claims to gravitas.

Speaker William Lenthall’s moment of glory was the essence of what’s simple, which made it of even more sparkling transcendence.  A Speaker known to spit on his finger so he could have a better gauge of the direction from which the wind blows, and the strength of it.  Yet he did stand on his own two feet, if only for a fleeting moment in time.  A man not above partaking of the sweet spoils of his time, his office.  Still, when the circumstances demanded, he dug deep and from somewhere unknown within himself found what it took to stand before a king and deny him.

I do not know, nor do I care to know, what voices ring incessantly and tormentingly in Speaker Nadir’s head.  But I do know that on this day, and in these times, he has succeeded in sinking where no other Speaker of the National Assembly of the Guyanese people has sunk before.  He has watched as his spirit, his substance, his powers mutated into a blend of sawdust and mincemeat.  A worse fate could not have befallen any man.  The tragedy of it all, is that it is by his own hand.  Guyana’s Speaker can still save himself, stave off the remorseless warrior horsemen of history.  He must somehow find that grace to separate himself from what and who he is now.

(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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• democratic Guyana, GHK Lall, Manzoor Nadir, parliamentary Speaker

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