OPINION: A big hand for Pres. Ali from a little citizen

Last Updated on Saturday, 20 September 2025, 16:32 by Writer

By GHK Lall

Through disappointment, despite anxiety, I reach to Pres. Ali to offer a helping hand, a humble syllable of counsel. He must know the temperature of his team; his role as chief tribune in Guyana shouldn’t be touched by the vehement, nor embody any trace of the retaliatory. When Stabroek News, Prime News, Capitol News, and others are excluded from His Excellency’s very first press conference at the beginning of his second term, what could be at work? Who was behind such a development that leaves the leader of this land looking lesser, smaller, lighter? I repeat that President Ali must know his people, their readiness to stick it to others, their history of what parallels those press exclusions last week, as mirrored in various excesses in the years gone by.

I will not tell Guyanese where I think the president went wrong. I will share with all Guyanese what I believe Pres. Ali could have done better, without uttering a word of condemnation, a phrase of criticism. The objective is to build, not to break down. What point is proven? Of what utility can that ever be? Is there any Guyanese who is truly of the belief that Mohamed Irfaan Ali would invite Kaieteur News and somehow neglect to ensure that Stabroek News isn’t on his list of press guests? I harbor no such beliefs. But neither a king nor a pontiff nor a president works in isolation. There’s a team in which hands much is placed, plenty is entrusted. I think that the president was blindsided, put on the backfoot, by his own, which prompted one veteran journalist, Mr. Denis Chabrol of Demerara Waves Oneline News to walk out of the proceedings when the rules were laid out. This much I will say: the president may have known in passing about subject areas and questions and the limits imposed around those. But I am doubtful that he knew of the banishment of SN et al.

Indeed, there have been issues and objections to the contents of editorials. Indeed, also, there has been anger and resentment over items covered, and how covered. But it is beyond me to think so poorly of President Ali that he resorts to the bludgeon of exclusion so swiftly, so close, to his second inaugural address to the nation. Or, at all, in the instance of SN. The others, perhaps, but not SN. How would that pass unanswered? How would that not roil the waters of the local media? How could that not attract the interest and alarm of the resident international community, more the official section, and less the commercial strain? In other words, and to use an Americanism, there was no upside for the president from what was a broadside against selected sections of the Guyanese media.

I think that the president knows that gone are the days of blind obeisance to the divine right of kings, and the infallibility of popes. Present are the new times that insist that presidents and prime ministers (and, if I may, vice presidents) are subjects of the people. From the last peon to the most outstanding polymath to the very first tiers of those who take conscientious (and constitutional) objection to what arises under their watch, they are all subjects. I started out with no vision, no intention, of preaching to Pres. Ali. It just came, as fingers flew across letters and keyboard. The president must stand, must be seen, as the moral center, and the center of moral clarity, in this country. And, adjacent to those, he must rise as the ethical pillar that forms one of the cornerstones of credibility in this country.

To exclude is to intrude negligently with what is perilous relative to the president’s promises a few scant days earlier. It was that the press has some standing of note in the sweep of the president’s attention, in the obligations of his leadership role, in the grasp of his intellect. My objective is to coexist with a president of whom I can be proud. The same goes for the opposition. For the president’s team. For an opposition that is about the interests of all Guyanese. For a media establishment that does its duty honestly and responsibly. There will be those inevitable differences. But they must not command deterioration to degradation through exclusion. A lapse is fertile ground for learning. From learning there is growing. From growing there is a Guyana that can revel in the glory of its dazzling, new era. Pres. Ali has choices before him. May he be guided to make the right one relative to relations with the media, and the conditions that lead to mutual benefit.