OPINION: Motives, better leadership, and ;come right

Last Updated on Thursday, 14 March 2024, 15:44 by Denis Chabrol

by GHK Lall

SN’s two lead captions of Monday March 11th paired Excellencies Ali and Jagdeo baring their teeth and talons at prospective parties and their personnel gearing up for the late 2025 elections.  It promises to be a humdinger, a real whatchamacallit.  President Ali went low: motives.  The former president Jagdeo came out swinging: come right.  Both national leaders of incomparable record (and substance) remind me of Baghdad Bob: like him, they use bluster to coat their naked fear.  Given what they have inflicted on Guyanese, I believe that it would not be a stretch for reflections of one Chemical Ali to surface.

The Guyana number one has concerns about the motives of potential entrants to the elections field.  If I were an adviser to the local head, I would whisper in his ear: go easy on that one about motive, liege.  When a young man, a new leader, could promise with a hand on sacred text to be about transparency and accountability, and then fall apart in making good on that oath taken, then his is not the best voice to expound on the motives of others.  What motives could there be, dear president, for all the secrecies and clandestine operations (and operators, including Israelis) that have bedeviled the Ali governance standard in the last three years and six months.  The missing days are a gift from me: the dodges and concealments during those days don’t count.

Since it is the season of charity for believers, another hand is extended to President Ali: it is ill-advised to pontificate about the motives of others, when one’s own closet has its hidden gems.  The president had many chances to come out but refused.  For those with a prurient fixture of mind, it has more to do with the tangled web that he has weaved, and less of the closet that has gotten a bad name.  There are other chaps in the master’s fold for that situation.  Better leadership started with President Ali, and he had everything going for him.  People who knew nothing.  No guiding principles to follow at that level, the ones that are between a man, his conscience, his mirror.  No godfather of merit to restrain.  All the money in the world.  All the goodwill of the Great White Father in DC, and the Great White Mother (remember Sarah Ann) in crude oil country Guyana.  When President Ali should have been operating as a true commander in chief, he was content to be a crybaby clerk without a pen, a program, and a policy (and little by way of prowess).  Yo, Willie Boy, tell him I said so.  Taking all of this into account, when I read that His Excellency spoke of motives, I first thought of a man with scars on his forehead and one who can’t help drooling all over himself criticizing those with ingrown toenails.

Relative to Bharrat ‘Come right’ Jagdeo, this man is in the wrong business.  As well as he has seemingly done in dark operations and the horror movie business (leadership), he has missed his calling.  Jagdeo would have done exceedingly well as a court jester.  Not satisfied with doing so at his weekly shindig (aka press conferences) at Freedom House (George Orwell called his Animal Farm), Jagdeo had to take his act all the way to that sacred PPP site called Babu Jaan.  I apologize to family and party members for the misspelling.  Really, it should be the pious Dr. Jagdeo who should be contrite about profaning a place that is all about the profound.  The man and memory, and his now expanding mystique, are.  Imagine this character straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson and Mary Shelley warning potential battlers for a piece of Guyana’s desecrated political turf to ‘come right.’  There is nothing that could be easier in Guyanese politics, given that Jagdeo has done so little right over his dreary and distressing years in the domestic sphere. When Herr Jagdeo made the bar so low, then few should have an iota of difficulty on how to come right.’

I am smelling the blood and sweat and tears of one hell of a frightened Guyanese politician.  He gave himself the oil portfolio with visions of coin dancing in his head, only for Alistair to make spaghetti and mash out of him.  Now he seeks refuge in policymaking.  The one policy that Jagdeo has made since assigning this portfolio to himself is that there is no policy.  No policy on oil (Vick has his imported American-made muzzle) no policy on cybercrime (other than go out and get dissenters); no policy on cost-of-living pressures (he doesn’t feel any, so it should be the same for ordinary Guyanese).  Like I have often said, this guy Jagdeo is a jester, a cheap one.  Come right, he says.  I don’t think that Bharrat Jagdeo knows right from wrong and mistakes the latter for the former.  I recognize a great global joker in this fine Guyanese political entertainer Bharrat Jagdeo.