Guyana of yore, Guyana offshore

Oct 02, 2024 Features / Columnists, The GHK Lall Column

Kaieteur News-  In days of old, when Guyanese had little money, they had plenty of dignity. They were never far from empty, but they were happy.  This was in that quaint time long ago when there was no oil, no Exxon and Chevron, no Ali, no Jagdeo, no Norton and no Hughes.  All those beauties came, and Guyanese are now worse for wear.  All the money per head in the world, all the world looking enviously at country and citizen, and there is this palpably piteous state: the richest hungry belly people on the planet.  Not to be left out of the excitement, American entertainer Alistair Routledge took up permanent residence here; he gave himself a green card that was stamped with US$ signs all over.  He spoke in grand tones about the greatest revenue stream flowing from Exxon to the poor Guyanese people.  That was the beginning, the first stream of balderdash, hogwash and trash.  It has never stopped.

Some of the best academics in the world took one look at Guyana and it was enough.  Guyana is the best of the best, head and shoulder on top of the rest.  One of Charles Darwin’s greatest evolutionary proofs, world-class PPP statisticians, calculate that Guyanese have it so good that when they can’t get enough stew fish, the PPP Government could always be depended on to deliver stewed farces.  They call those indexes.  If such were a measurement of the government’s intelligence quotient, there would be one consistent result.  Dumber than a dog without a bark and totally lacking in a sense of smell to complete an altogether wretched picture.

The irony is that there is more than enough to go around, but not everyone gets anything close to their fair share.  It is that kind of mathematics and civis that dominate in this environment.  When the people had nothing, they somehow found the spiritual conviction to believe that they had everything that mattered.  Belief is relief.  Now that they hear that they have everything, they are looking and looking for any glimpse that they can get of what looks like something.  They end with an earful.  President Ali is pleased to give his best imitation of a jack-in-the box.  A man and leader who operates on a coiled spring (ask at own risk, persist and be prepared to lose head).  If ever there was a leader who is a walking guillotine, it is Mohamed Irfaan Ali.  Vice President Jagdeo thinks it best to function in a hide-and-seek fashion (tomorrow will come and it will be something to talk about).  He tried that one before and Guyanese are still talking about the peculiar skills that have come to define him: his fire doesn’t exist and the chestnuts he promises to pullout and deliver always seem to be of the poisonous variety.  On the opposition side of the new Guyana equation, there is Mr. Norton, whose claim to fame is catch me if you can.  Guyanese can and did, only for them to come to this most uncomfortable of positions: They don’t like what they caught.  They cast their eyes to the hills and then to heaven in the hope of some revelation, and they got one.  His name is C.A. Nigel Hughes, Esq.  His pedigree is both exhaustive and illuminating.  Guyanese by extraction and Texan by one hell of a sturdy legal contraption.  Whereas Ali and Jagdeo boast many heads, which means that they have many mouths from which to speak, Mr. Hughes is a breath of air straight out of the Texas prairie.  Whoever can separate Nigel from Alistair just won the runoff for president of Guyana.  It is not the Gordian knot; it is the Guyanese conundrum.  Who is who, and who is for whom?

In this the glittering oil age of Guyana, citizens are groaning.  Everything is going up and they are going down.  Over in Persia, Alladin had his genie; over here in Guyana, Ali has his ‘Open Sesame’ hallucinations.  Look at who is welcomed with open arms.  There is Jet Blue, Jesus Bronchalo, and Joe Biden’s agents (some secret), among an ever-expanding pantheon in what is now a full-fledged foreign invasion.  For sure, it is not the British Invasion powered by those four boys from the Merseyside, the Beatles.  It is the day of the locusts, and they are like leeches draining the lifeblood out of Guyana.  While all this fun and frolic is going on, Guyanese are still starving.  For the truth about where they really are.  For the real story about where their leaders are taking them, intend to do about them.  About them, not for them.  The gods gave the Greeks Helen and look what became of Troy.  The same Gods gave Africans a continent, and remember whose eyes lit up in faraway places.  It is an ugly story that goes on to this day.  It is said that Africa is the heart of darkness.  But whose heart turned out to be the darkest.  Guyanese should take note.  The Guyanese tribalists with traces from close to China pretend to forget what was meted out to their own people by the Bay of Bengal for centuries.  They rub shoulders with certain new people, and they believe that they are whiter than white.  Just as tricky, sneaky, and slippery also.

Like all those places that God wanted to see what they were made of, how they would manage, he gave Guyana oil.  Same story.  Point made.  Case closed.  Farces and foolishness are alike, no matter the time, place.

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

• Jagdeo, Nigel Hughes, PPP Government