Latest update July 27th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 24, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column
Kaieteur News – Sorry to disappoint folks, but this is a journey away from the hallowed sonnets and syntax of literature and Charles Dickens. Incredible as this may sound, expectations today start out with cricket, then His Majesty’s Royal Navy. And just so that my dear friend, Dr. Anil Nandlall, QC, SC, and PPP MC does not feel isolated and left all on his lonesome, he comes in for extended and honorable mention in this offering about great expectations. English Literature it is not, but all about the vacuity, puerility, and inanity that are now so thoroughly Guyanese over this oil.
Dr. Nandlall, the Nawab of a State going by the name of pusillanimity, has a starring role. The two senior guys direct the show from behind the scenes, he steps forward and does a startling impression of Mehmood and Johnny Walker (the comedy man, not the one with the top hat and umbrella on a whisky bottle). I begin with a short bat and ball story.
In England’s storied cricketing history, there was that profane fast bowling legend, Yorkshire’s Frederick Truman. He was one of a kind, not these touchy-feely, warmhearted, politically correct thunderbolt throwers of today. Once, on a bad cricketing day for the chaps from Lancashire, Surrey, Oxford, and the Army, Truman was told that England was expecting a topnotch performance from him with the ball. In authentic Truman form, the irascible and often pungent terrorizer of batsmen (they call them batters now, like if they did something else before) responded along these lines: ‘that’s the bloody problem, England is always expecting. No blasted wonder why she is called the Mother Country’.
What is there not to love about an original like that, particularly when the expectation was first uttered by that other immortal of Britannica’s ruling over the waves. For the dumb in the PPP (Mr. Nandlall excluded, naturally), that would be Vice Admiral Horatio Nelson at the Battle of Trafalgar. The things they drummed into our heads in those days, and now there is Jagdeo trying to do the same, screaming at the top of his lungs about the beauty of Exxon. Jagdeo being Jagdeo gets Anil Nandlall to do the heavy lifting on oil spill coverage, a task at which he is only too willing to burnish his head of state candidacy; now the rest is on the table and left to the jurisdiction and judgment of history.
Specifically, this is what the big Legal Affairs Minister had to say relative to this troubling business about Exxon and parent guarantee if a cataclysmic oil spill were to occur out there. May it never come to that day, but it is worth listening to Mr. Nandlall: “If it is US$100B then that is what we are entitled to. It is not limited in any form or fashion by this assurance…” God bless, Mr. Nandlall; and God bless Guyana for having a grand son of the soil like Mohabir Anil Nandlall. If that is his expectation, then he is greater than Charles Dickens. Since he has such grand expectations of Exxon, no question that he stands in a category way ahead of Horatio Nelson in the expectations sweepstakes. Now since I’m all British today, stone the crows. I admit publicly that the AG blew me away with that one.
Indeed, if we are entitled to US$100B, then it is what it is. However, does Anil Nandlall on his brightest day genuinely expect Exxon to fork over US$10B to a ‘nat-a-fart’ country like Guyana? Does Mohabir Nandlall truly expect that these goddamn pirates will pay US$5B to a society overflowing with a million colored people? It should not elude the eyesight of Guyanese that I have not gone anywhere close to his hypothetical US$100B figure, and already I am sweating blood over a lousy number that is one tenth, even a twentieth, of what he is bandying about as a reference.
The voraciously predatory Exxon is battling Guyana with pickaxe and sledgehammer for a skimpy US$107M from an audit. Yet this character straight out of political Hollywood is so sure of the company that he tries this arithmetic six for a nine on his own brothers and sisters. I regret that the schools that the esteemed AG went to failed to teach him to think in a straight line and for himself, while using the record of oil history as his guide. Especially that of Exxon. If any Guyanese thinks that Chevron is any better, he or she should check with the people in neighboring Ecuador. For the enlightenment of the great Anil Nandlall (at least in his own mind), Exxon declared judicial war against its fellow Americans and nickeled and dimed them down from US$5B to US$450M for damages from the Exxon Valdez rupture in Alaska. In Guyanese, that’s beating down. If there is a struggle against Venezuela, I do not want Anil Nandlall anywhere near to me; I will take, ahm, ai-ya-yi, Gail Teixeira. God help me.
There is no doubt in my mind that the man Nandlall knows better, is made of better stuff. But this is what oil has done to different political men whenever it touched in nonwhite countries. It transforms them into dangerous caricatures made even more so when they adopt a gelatin coating. With expectations of the grand texture of Dr. Nandlall, Guyana can’t go wrong. To return to cricket, it has been called the game of glorious uncertainty. In the dirty game of Guyanese politics, there is no-baller Nandlall with his inglorious certainty. Not for the last time: how does Guyana keep churning out characters like the erudite and effervescent Mohabir Anil Nandlall is anyone’s guess. I give up. Go my way.
(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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