Lessons from the Speaker, the president – unwanted ones

Feb 15, 2026 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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Hard Truths by GHK Lall

(Kaieteur News) – It’s sad day to be a Guyanese, to watch this country go to the dogs.  Then, worse still, note how the dogs sniff and then lift their hind legs to indicate their rejection and disdain.  When even dogs react like that, this country has tumbled deep into the pits.  I look at the Speaker of the National Assembly, and there is class in session, unwanted lessons learned.  I glance at the president, and I hang my head at how leadership has descended into the dumps.  The ambience of that environment taints the spirit, vanquishes any confidence in what’s at the top.

The top is topless.  It is as naked as that; that recoiling to many.  What is leadership if not about being a decisionmaker, the problem solver in the squeeze of tight spaces.  More than once, more than twice, the president has pleaded distance, played his unpersuasive games that some matters of national import are not his business.  Dereliction of duty?  Or sliding away from making a tough call?  Or a plaster for a sore that leaks pus profusely, but which fits poorly?  For those who think that’s inspiring leadership, think again.  How so, when routine decisions aren’t made, because one’s own handpicked people will be the loser.  The opposite of fearless leadership holds true: it’s of a leader who is adept at shifting his feet, swiveling his head, twisting his lips.  Take a stand, make a call.  Without the snarling.

For then what is a president for, if it isn’t petitioning that final singular, unimpeachable tribune, the tribune of tribunes, and the courageous is rendered?  Even when the less than Solomonic, Justinian, or rabbinic has been delivered, there’s a sense of relief: courage with decisive power took precedence for the greater national good.  I make no reference to any office, any roadblock, any specific set of circumstances that lays bare the self-made and self-satisfied impotency that now suffocates Guyana’s presidency.  If decisions of that nature, with respect for the law, with leadership sagacity at its finest, cannot be made, then of what utility that last resort mediator, that final arbitrator?  These are lessons I abhor, will have no part of, in my silver years.  Guyanese should have no difficulty in determining how much more vigorous my reaction would have been if the years were lesser, the days younger.  Some leadership attributes are so nonsensical as to be, well, nothing but utterly nonsensical.  Capricious doesn’t meet the call of the times.  Fear is what drives national leadership decisions on the issues that matter.  To do so would reveal this, expose to that; and the best decision, therefore, is the stagnation of a nondecision.  Here are some more millions.  It was US Supreme Court Justice Brandeis who said that, “Power must always feel the check of power.”

Take the Speaker.  The top leader in the topmost house of Guyana.  I study where he is, and the one searing thought that intrudes and refuses to leave is that he has metamorphosed into a seemingly wanton and arbitrary disregarder of the fundamentals of commonsense.  A house captain energised and devoured by his defiance of what’s accepted as fair and balanced, and who has taken leave of what subscribes to depth and profoundness.  I behold a man placed at the apex of parliament careening after the uncharted, convulsed by his convictions, one who has impressed himself that his toxic actions are digestible and no harms have been inflicted.  When the Speaker should stand out as a leader with the maturity and soundness that his office calls for, he has been content to imbibe of the hostile, the narrow, and what brings the parliamentary edifice still lower.  How much lower can it go?  The better inquiry may be: how much farther does the Speaker have to plummet in the freefall that is of his own making?

The Speaker floats around in a circle, but from his telling of his parliamentary adventures there is insistence that he walks along a straight line.  The challenges are not a test of his ability at geometry, but of the quality of his logic, the symmetry of his reasoning.  Watching the Speaker of Guyana’s National Assembly on the move is almost identical to absorbing Prince Dracula operating under the cover of dark.  Darkness has overtaken many leadership levels in this country.  Both president and Speaker operate in a mental dark room.  Parliament, that last bastion of citizens, should have been off-limits.

(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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• GHK Lall, lessons, National Assembly, Speaker

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