OPINION: Pres Ali: leadership through contradictions

Last Updated on Tuesday, 17 March 2026, 19:20 by Writer

by GHK Lall

Stabroek News is gone. One era is over. Another will begin. How will the PPP Govt react? What depths will it go to then? In reflecting on the passing of SN, I find myself thinking of Pres. Ali. The contrasts in him. The contradictions that torment him, push him to sluggish steps, falling to lower levels.

The president can venture far and wide, and listen to the people. A tip of the hat is due. Arrangements made for birth certificates long delayed, going nowhere. Or a land title held up. The bureaucracy has to be cleared, so that precious pieces of paper could be freed up, finally in hand. Few would argue. Many applaud. For there was Excellency Ali raising his hand, moving matters along. Stuck ones. Problematic ones. Troubling ones. Positive. Now comes the contradictions.

The president says Guyana is a democracy, one where free speech in its widest expression is a norm. On that he is voluminous. But there was SN staring him in his face, hanging over his head. A haunting, poignant contradiction of his leadership strength, quality. I struggle over whether the contradiction is in his governance standards, or the conflicts in the man himself and his attributes. Fear is one. An unhealthy fear for frankness, a morbid dread for the broadest range of Guyanese opinions and positions. A leader that can spring into action over the ordinary (birth certificates) that’s too important to be entrusted to lesser servants, but of extraordinary significance to waiting, hoping citizens. But, and yet, a leader so regularly loudly energized when it suits his visions, can be so silent, so missing in action, when the extraordinary calls for his compulsory intervention. The departure of Stabroek News. If Pres. Ali is truly the genuine article on democracy, an open society, and wanting to know how a cross-section of Guyanese really think, then his presidential imprint had to be on display.

Pay SN for ad arrears. There is no cash flow problem. So, what’s the problem? Why the contradiction? In what’s said versus what’s done? Why is there the painful glaring contrast? Where there is the best in presidential energy for land certificates, then the essence of presidential lethargy for a certificate that attests to how free speech is in Guyana. I think that Pres. Ali is better than this shabby media record involving a newspaper that is more than a national institution. It was a newspaper that managed by sheer dint of tireless endeavor and fierce independence to become an unanointed national trust. What I think of Pres. Ali is clear to me and all others. What I am still to know is how much I am right about him, and if wrong, how minor that may be. The facts on the ground stand in my corner.

Pres. Ali is Guyana’s National Information Officer. Time for another contradiction. Information not liked is lashed out of existence. Stabroek News victimized. Kaieteur News is next. Another one: he disengages rather clumsily from authorising the release of government information that civil society activists seek to access. But he is Guyana’s information commissar. It is either that Irfaan Ali is thin-skinned to that extent, or he unthinkingly gives the shortest shrift to the place and value of information and (the freest access to it (as allowed by law) in a democracy. There is only one kind of democracy that I know. Apparently, the president has two kinds: one that he extols exuberantly, then the other that he and his PPP Govt practices unashamedly. In so doing, I believe that Guyana’s head-of-state first abandoned the power and possibilities of the presidency, then absconded from the call of duty. Thus, he impoverishes his leadership, sullies his governance record. Guyana revels in its hundreds of billions. Somehow, it pains, it terrorizes, to pay less than a hundred million to SN (and more to KN). Credible leaders honor their words; scrupulous governments honor their debts.

Time for today’s final contradiction. Pres Ali likes boasting about listening to the people. From Friday February the 13^th to the Ides of March, 31 days altogether, the daily threnodies of Guyanese loss and grief re SN’s exit have rippled, and soaked, then soared from the opinion pages of SN, KN, and others media houses. Pres. Ali could have manifested his best listening then. He didn’t. A man of contradictions. A leader given to convulsions, lacking in democratic convictions.