President Ali pontificates, exaggerates, and deteriorates

Mar 10, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

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H@rd Truths by GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – His Excellency, President Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali is a lost man.  The honorific (‘excellency’) does not bestow that on the holder.  But it does demand excellence of the recipient, whether president or peasant.  To the horror of countless citizens, Excellency Ali glories in what lacks essence, thrills to the less than impeccable.  He pontificates, he exaggerates.  When he exaggerates, he makes himself low rate.  No propagandist can smooth over.  The teachers’ mediation matter is of a president given to showmanship, one diminished in leadership.

‘There is an ongoing process with the ministry and government.’  So insisted Excellency Ali with a straight face.  The man is now a first-rate actor, a dissembler and twister.  The teachers’ strike is about money.  The Ministry of Education’s invitation to the teachers’ union and accompanying agenda dated January 29, 2024, had many things.  But there was nothing about money.  Nothing.  Money is the heart of this bitter struggle, this struggling for a wage so Guyanese can live.  Live not like Excellency Ali, and his extended cohort of overcompensated and overjoyed, and overfed and mostly obese, cats.

The teachers’ action is about the dignity of labor, the decency due to every worker, the integrity that should be cherished by all leaders.  The latter has been a lost cause.  Honor thine agreements, not violate them; then ravage those objecting.  Stand by thy words.  Let them testify to the kind of man before the microphone, the class of leader sitting across the table.  I have a word of advice for Excellency Ali, and his advisers: elevated office and ivory towers infested by the swinish and boorish lose ivory’s sheen, fall from height.  When Guyana’s headman stretches facts and circumstances, he loses presidential luster of a president.  I believe he resembles those young Britishers who used to shave their heads.  They made a living harassing, terrorizing, and brutalizing colored people.

The president loves to blow balloons.  On the issue of oil, Excellency Ali was his usual burnished self.  I think he favors mud.  Listen to this powerhouse of a president. “You have an existing contract.  You think that is how it happens.  That is how the world operates.   That you can just walk in one day and decide I had this contract with you.  I am changing it now” (KN October 8, 2023).  I hold my head and want to scream.  This cannot be spoken by anyone with a university degree, certainly not somebody with a PhD.  It can never be from a national leader, a president.  The problem is that it is.  This was how President Ali distorted oil matters, reduced talk of “renegotiation” of the Exxon contract to the simplistic.  Perhaps, he convinced himself that he is dealing with simpletons.  If he were not president, I would have readily affixed that same word [simpleton] to His Excellency, PhD or no PhD.  He does so himself.  How to explain (again) what the President presented to his audience?  Listen: “you can just walk in one day and decide I had this contract with you.  I am changing it now.”  The President is not this kind of fool, nor are Guyanese this limited.  Frankly, this is leadership vacuousness multiplied.  President Ali himself had once said re sanctity of contract that ‘we are an honorable people’.  Yet he gives such short thrift to collective bargaining. Whither honor then, master?

President Ali should know that even a binding contract between two inconsequential individuals for tiny matters does not follow the course that he outlined. A junior in a company (or his party) doing what President Ali tabled (“I am changing it now”) would be ridiculed.  If the president doesn’t know that, then what does he know?  He does not have to be a Harvard Business School graduate, or a Middle Temple law product, to discern the glaring holes in his representations.  Presidents can pontificate.  When they exaggerate, they deteriorate. Renegotiation of Exxon’s contract is a most combustible issue.  It is also one with broad national implications.  Money for all Guyanese, including striking teachers.  Droves of Guyanese don’t have to flock Freedom House for a handout, a hoax that hurts.

President Ali should not dance on this matter.  He must commit to bearing any blow from any superpower adversary for better for Guyanese. Teachers, public servants, pensioners, low wage workers, others. President Ali knows full well that renegotiation is more than walking in one day and saying I have had it with this, and “I am changing it now.” Negotiations are almost always a tortured, tiring, and thankless process, even when friendly parties are involved with lesser matters.  In the instance of the Exxon contract, there is no equality of standing. We must overpower with sheer will.

It is more than a day’s work, more than Exxon being receptive, more than laborious, tedious, testing patience.  Renegotiation is war, and clearly the president comes up with these subterfuges (a day) to dodge battles.  It is rank cowardice. About angling to retain power, too. Most negotiations are long haul endeavors.  The teachers’ situation is one.  It is no quarter given willingly.  The irony is that Guyana’s president is so mortally afraid of “superpower” Exxon that he surrenders immediately.  But he batters teachers and belittles Guyanese. It is obvious that President Ali has lost touch with the mood, expectations, and realities of Guyanese.  His bearing signals a man more prepared for the contentious than the conciliatory that Guyanese urgently need. A society wracked by internal cracks lives with a leader who prefers jiving and jousting, having the last word. So, he pontificates and exaggerates and deteriorates.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• diminished, Excellency Ali, GHK Lall, pontificates, Showmanship

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