OPINION: Promises collide with distrust, the last five years

Last Updated on Monday, 28 July 2025, 18:44 by Writer

By GHK Lall

It is a festival of promises. Promise everything. A potpourri of them, a smorgasbord, Guyanese get to choose. If only half of these promises are kept, Guyanese can be the next Saudis. Poverty would be dead and buried. Thanks, Mr. President. A leader who is incapable of or unwilling to deliver on something as basic as access to information, now promises to deliver a death blow to poverty. I’m voting for this Messiah. Messiah or a pariah to the poor? He doesn’t have to look far. The president should be honest enough, confident enough, to look in his own mirror. The one on his wall, or his rearview one.

Promises were made in 2020. Kept. The private sector rejoices. The less than 1% is delirious. Not from fevers, but PPP-induced prosperity. It has been a two-way street. Over 200 taxes reduced/eliminated, due to the mountains of millions in hand, and still, and still, the poor man’s hand is still as empty and lonely as his stomach. Somehow, the supercharged velocity of money in the Guyana economy didn’t make its way to his doorway. Roads, yes; oh, roads and boards and billboards, but with a gnawing, remorseless difference. The poor is poorer, but the president now promises no poverty. This is how the president pauperizes himself: a leader of sprawling promises, and to such extents that he is spreadeagled from the weight of distrusts, the dismissals that haunt his existence. A man thinking, hoping, that he is an inspiration, when the best that he does is impoverish himself further.

It took five years for the president to be aware that there is poverty in Guyana. Blame that on the World Bank. No stats, no rats in the PPP woodwork. Or in the president’s majestic edifice. For the first time since 2020, the biggest bluffer in Guyana is now conscious of a beast that answers to the name of cost-of-living. When cost-of-living is killing half of the population of Guyana, and killing them dead (added for emphasis), then poverty is living, breathing, prospering. I am told that the president is a bright man, which I question not, papers and all, motheaten and more. It took him five years to find his footing, find his voice, about poverty and what he promises to do about that maneater of a monster. Better late than never, it is said. Like a man wrongly imprisoned for years by the State, there is now the assurance from the State, the big presidential chat box himself, that recompense for ordeals is forthcoming. Just give a chance to make good on this one promise that takes aim at poverty and to bury it 66 feet under. I recommend that the Office of the President be compelled to take up residence there, too.

The president, the government, had all the riches, all the resources, in hand the last five years. The president took the best care of the people, his people. There is One Guyana, and there is One Guyana. People like me are Venezuelans; illegal ones; ones with unpatriotic instincts and intents. To speak out against the failures of a president, one who is the mold and model for the naked emperor is to be unpatriotic, a sinner worse than Lucifer and Shaitan. Given the assets in his hands, the choices before the president were dizzying and tempting. The contractor class had to be repaid, the private sector aristocracy pampered and pleased, and the criminal cabals fed and fattened. Now let’s all be reasonable, be astutely mathematically-minded. Having prioritized those 4F platoons, having empowered their prosperity, what was left for last to address was poverty. Some had to be shortchanged, some, be losers. The president made his bed accordingly.

But now he has remade himself into a pilgrim. A pilgrim of hope for the deprived. The late Pope Francis should be pleased by this miracle in Guyana, from the most dreadful of sources, relative to his Jubilee Year proclamation. Spes non confundit (hope does not disappoint). To hope is to trust. To trust means that there is some rationale for belief. The president is either a false god or, to take him down several notches, a false prophet. A false prophet is a man of depthless, breathless, hollowness. Guyanese can attest from experience if he has been such a figure for the last five years. Every cry of the poor was suppressed. Every call to do something to alleviate their condition mocked and scorned. Statistics waved. Roads paved. Political contempt engraved. Guyana depraved.

Swirling around the plush presidential promises re poverty, there is a fatal collision in the making. Promises about poverty clash head-on with the twin specters of distrust and contempt. More colloquially: where were you, Mr. President, when I needed you? Most urgently.