Last Updated on Sunday, 27 September 2026, 19:26 by Writer
by GHK Lall
Written before, shared again. Pres Ali was in the right place at the right time, and with a truckload of the right assets billowing up from under the sea. In 2020, that was the reality of his inheritance. In 2025, the stars aligned even more rightly for him, what must rank as a supermajority in Guyana’s politics. His was the opportunity to be a leader larger than the man he is. The Guyana catastrophe is that Excellency Mohamed Irfaan Ali became a much smaller man than he started out being.
He goes to New York, and there before him in jammed substance, and breathless interest, was his vision of One Guyana. What does Guyana have to offer me? Not what I can do for Guyana, but what Guyana can do for me…. The president played to that crowd seeking personal prosperity, as politicians do. Somebody in his entourage, or left back home, was careful to place a screen over the abject poverty that saturates Guyana. Beloved, beckoning, Guyana, and its clinging poverty despite the billions of U.S. money made possible by rising geysers of oil powering to the sea’s surface. With a seven-seat majority, and oil money tumbling into Guyana’s accounts (then excitedly withdrawn), there was no obstacle in the president’s way to offer a cure to what was killing hundreds of thousands of Guyanese. The fear of inflation (banished), which presented room to maneuver. The curse was cost-of-living, of which the president didn’t want to hear anything about, for years.
It is not Ali’s style to display his warts, his self-created ones. When he could have reaped the rewards of being a workhorse for Guyanese, his preference was that of the show horse. One who tries to escape his entanglements related to a farm, only for him to get slammed by a boat. One hundred dead, and a hundred thousand questions (and suspicions) all justified, and the best that Excellency Ali is capable of is a secret, already suspect, Commission of Inquiry. Plus, a salvage operation that has the emergency brake on, rather than emergency energy infused. If this is excellency at its best, then it seems awfully close to obscenity. When Pres Ali has an opportunity to nurture the best in himself so that the worst in himself (and Guyana) could be overcome, he lived up to his name. MIA.
In his case, Georgetown or New York, it is always of that road not taken. The one of which that great American poet, Robert Frost, wrote so majestically:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I — I took the one less traveled by, and that made all the difference.
The show horse in Irfaan Ali does not inspire him to avoid the glitter of rhetoric; it interferes with him getting down to the difficult, dreary business of leading. Because there is no glory in going to that slower, tedious gear, that produces results, that could lift Guyana, he ducks the moment. The consultations. The compromises. The calls toward being grander than oneself.
The New York crowd has scant interest in the underbelly of Guyana, what should not be. What’s in there for me? Where’s the money, that’s the universal sound splitting the wind, almost like a mating call at peak alto range. They were looking for any ray of welcoming light from Pres Ali. He highlighted the brightness of economic opportunity. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Ali forgot to write a prescription if only to warn the hopefuls. Walk with own generator, preferably two of them. Six years after oil’s first flush, and increasingly higher volumes, the billions to the GPL Inc., have only led to more darkness, and more Turkish vessels in high demand. How overseas Guyanese whose only encounter with blackouts is during a hurricane or some other natural disaster will cope with the manmade ones here, is anybody’s guess. I am considering opening a free consultancy.
Pres Ali has the world at his feet. The perfect confluence of circumstances going for him. No other president of Guyana could say that he ever came a quarter of the way as close as Mr. Ali has. In only those three far-reaching areas of the lifeblood of existence — poverty, tragedy, and energy — he has been an utter failure. A flatterer who fails to impress. But still manages to get away with selling his half-stories and theatrical trailers to the naïve and newcomer, the innocent and incurious, and the hardcore believers and the half-cooked oil patriots. With so much going for Guyana in the last six years, and with Pres Ali in full charge, there shouldn’t be so many gaping potholes in his leadership story.
