OPINION: Plain and simple – GHK is intensely jealous of Jagdeo

Last Updated on Sunday, 14 July 2024, 13:17 by Writer

By Dr Randy Persaud, Professor Emeritus

I have no interest in analyzing any individual for the sake of it. That stuff is just boring. Yet, GHK Lall’s intense and almost pathological focus on Jagdeo forces one to ask questions about why the relentless attention. I said before, and it is worth repeating here: GHK Lall is making a career through directing all his time and energies on Jagdeo. I have never advanced a ‘theory’ of why this is so. Today I offer a first cut at things.

My theory is that writing about Jagdeo is a psychological mechanism used by GHK Lall to be close to the Vice President, because he admires him quite unfathomably. Put differently, GHK Lall wishes he were Jagdeo, but since that is not possible, he has opted to be an alter ego via critique. Writing allows Mr. Lall to be (Dasein) in the same space with Jagdeo, vicariously as it were. Lall is entangled in a complex situation here that he may not understand himself. He needs to pay attention to the psychology of jealousy and envy.

For Ramachandran and Jalal, “[j]ealousy is a motive of immense potency. Although you are often consciously aware of being jealous or envious of someone, sometimes the actual reasons for the envy are buried in your unconscious and disguised by rationalizations” (Frontiers in Psychology, 2017, p. 1619). This should help Mr. GHK Lall clarify his fixation with Jagdeo. His “rationalization” of being preoccupied with the VP/GS is that Jagdeo is too powerful and too admired. The psychological theory of envy is that the ‘patient’ (GHK Lall in this case) feels that he should have been in Jagdeo’s shoes.

If you have been reading Lall regularly, you would have noticed that he has a love-hate relationship with Jagdeo. He praises Jagdeo’s intelligence, his political skills, his instinct, and the GS’s resoluteness. He often calls him “my brother.” But are these not the traits that GHK thinks he himself has? You see, jealousy is not about hating the other person. It is rather the feeling that the other person has, what you should have had.

There is a political sociology that underpins the dynamic described above. In this case, one can meaningfully surmise that since Mr. Granger and the APNU+AFC were defeated at the polls, Lall lost his sense of grounding, of belonging. He is no doubt embarrassed and ashamed that the people whom he most admired were fingered in electoral banditry. Recall, that according to GHK, God sent Mr. Granger. Nothing less than an independent Commission of Inquiry found GHK’s brothers in arms, guilty of multiple counts of attempted electoral fraud.

Things got worse after the APNU+AFC defeat. The PPPC under President Irfaan Ali began to turn Guyana towards a path of rapid economic growth and social development. Wages are steadily rising. People from all levels of society are moving into their own homes. Young people are getting qualified and moving in professional jobs once thought impossible. Our debt is down. Our debt ratio is down. Revenues are up. Infrastructure is moving at a dizzying pace to the point where no less a figure than Bill Clinton, former President of the United States, remarked that Guyana is like a construction zone.

The APNU has offered no reason for Gabriel Lall to have any sense of direction. The fighting in the PNCR continued all the way into their Congress. The WPA is still latching on to race. The AFC is a lost cause. It is only a shadow of what it was. It even gave up on the claim of being multiracial.

Mr. Lall had a passing chance of his own resurrection in the ascent of Nigel Hughes. But as I remined the ex-Gold Board Man recently through the words of Naipaul: “All landscapes eventually turn to land, the gold of the imagination to the lead of reality.” Lil-G politics are more about his own career and financial interests, than about the future of Guyana.

In the meantime, Bharrat Jagdeo has been forcefully pushing back against disinformation. Because of the coordinated attacks on Guyana’s economic prosperity from the likes of Melinda Janki and those in the OGGN, Jagdeo has been laser-focused at his Thursday press conferences on taking down the lies and falsehoods. These press conferences are wildly popular. I think Lall watches these hoping for a mention. I don’t recall him getting one from Jaggy recently. Must be terribly disappointing for him.

Based on the above, it is in the best interest for GHK Lall to come to grips with the underlying causes of his inordinate focus on the PPP General Secretary. We understand that writing is cathartic. Write on, bro.

Dr Randy Persaud, Office of the President.