OPINION: Leaders are servants, people have the power to make them serve

Last Updated on Sunday, 12 November 2023, 6:42 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

Selected Guyanese can cheer President Ali for his seasonal gift of a barrel of oil each.  Manifesting generosity, His Excellency even threw in a few gallons more of crude to round off the dollop of cash at $25,000.  A barrel of oil a year for the richest people anywhere.  They have so much already that that is all that it takes to keep them placid.  Guyanese like it; take it with gratitude, some anxieties.  Is this all?

Around this time, the political leadership continuum solidifies.  It is this time in Guyanese life, when the norms that these must be challenged, discontinued.  Citizens have considerable power in their hands, they must use it.  They are the employers of governments, and when leaders and groups and governments piloting nations do not produce results that lift up the population enduringly, then citizens must wield the power they possess.

I weigh the gifts of President Ali, his traditional holiday decorations.  If President Ali were in old Harlem, he would remind of Nicky Barnes flinging money to the impoverished masses of the long-deprived hood.  Here the hood is a whole nation.  If he were in Howard Beach, the late John Gotti’s might feel challenged at the competition for attention and at fireworks.  President Ali is neither Nicky Barnes not John Gotti, but he reminds of them: Bosses fully in charge, with nothing of the servant present, one responsive to the people’s cries.  A responsive, resourceful servant in the best expressions of what a servant leader should be.  Look at President Ali, and there is man and leader that is all swagger, despite his hand being so maagah (a barrel a head).  I behold a leader squeezing his people into a corner, and handing them a tiny, squishy banana whose nutritional value has dissipated., taste upsetting.  In terser language, that is what $25,000 and 8 percent do for people who have been condemned to desperate straits, whose GDP is bigger than their heads could fathom.

The tragedy is that Dr. Ali is not alone.  He is the apex of the ill-fated pantheon that mesmerizes, then mashes and mangles Guyanese.  Undoubtedly, and considering Guyana’s long arid leadership history, presidents, prime ministers, and ministers have a paltry understanding of what genuine leader is, and what their associated roles are.  A servant mainly, a servant only.  They have always operated as though they answer to no one, do not care what anyone thinks; could give a damn what anyone says.  In fact, this president listens to the constructive only, by his own definition only.  ‘Constructive’ is what pleases him, boosts his priorities, inflates his ego, cushions his falls.  Those abound, but to those he will never admit.  Hence, there is neither learning nor growing.  Adolf and Saddam were like that; so, too, is that chubby-cheeked leader in Pyongyang.

Imagine a leader standing as governor over the richest country anywhere, and there are these legions of poor eking out a hardscrabble living.  In this president’s mind (and the others), there is no obligation to any citizen; not even struggling kith and kin.  Democracy, it is called.  Strong leadership, too.  I discern invalids for citizenship, where prostration is the only action.

The shoe of duty is not on the foot of leaders only; citizens wear one also.  Sadly, citizens have surrendered their power meekly, submitted to being led by the nose, and reduced themselves to a state of unnecessary dependency before those they gave power.  Citizens have the power to bring about change; the ballot box is just one option.  Too many citizens cherish the security of abject docility, one that is ecstatic at any contemptuous leadership pittance delivered.  The richest people globally are dirt poor in attributes that make them unworthy of their gifts. Unless each man and woman respect their roles, and have some higher regard for what citizenship means, then they empower leaders to maintain their top-down, what-I-say-goes ways.  One leader, a former president is so citizen-oriented that all he can speak of is foreign investors, their priorities, their anxieties, and their rights to Guyana’s rich prizes.  He has fallen in love with foreigners rubbing his head in approval.  Another leader is so careful picking his words that the thought is he pays a hundred American dollars for each word uttered.

Leaders will not change if those who can bring about change are complacent, invisible, anemic, apathetic.  Why give citizens more consideration, when there is graveyard silence, only broken now and then by naysayers and conscientious objectors, who are easily denounced and demonized?  Citizens have the best arsenal that can be imagined: their heads and their inheritance, but what is not theirs to any satisfactory degree.  They live it.  They know it.  They face walls that don’t speak, a forlorn unspeakable future.  Citizens have nodded when leaders tell them they should see a a glass almost full, and not one that is seven-eighths empty.  The calamity that is a national tragedy is that there is no glass anywhere around.  Guyanese have allowed it to slip out of their grasp, be grabbed by their leaders.  The richest can’t be this weak, the most talked about, this barren.  The power of the people can move mountains, hurdle any obstacle, including human ones.  When unused, then a barrel of oil ($25,000) is the reward for passive citizenship.  When citizens stay still, then leaders dump dung on them.