Dear Editor,
A social media clip came to me overnight, compliments of a citizen. It was His Excellency, President Dr. Mohamed I. Ali. After the first line, “Everybody is a specialist now…a former president…” I took a hasty exit when he reached “engineer” in that same sentence. For what I saw and heard in those 15-20 seconds was not a dear beloved national leader, a brother I can respect. What I saw and heard was a crude rapper.
President Ali aimed and fired his potshot at who I take to be His Excellency Donald Ramotar (a “former president”). If a man who was with founder Cheddi Jagan could be disparaged in this manner – “a specialist” of no standing – then I shudder to think of how those outside the party’s fold are damned and denigrated. A President is a president, and of that let there not be any mistake. Let there be an absence of mean-spirited attack on a man calling for better for Guyana, through renegotiation, through delivering those responsible for the national audit humiliation.
Disturbingly, Excellency Ali is excited to fire a salvo at former President Ramotar, who spoke like a true patriot, a man with working class instincts. But the same Excellency Ali is content to grin and grimace while another former President, Dr. B. Jagdeo makes him (he, President Ali) into an international spectacle.
Consider this: If the President is going to make a living denouncing every Guyanese (women, writers, the independent media, Transparency Institute, engineers, and even a former president [all conscientious objectors]), then all that he would have is a cohort of people who tell him what he wants to hear, who play him. All the critics and naysayers, Dr. President, are not cranks and crackpots. All just cannot be.
Further, President Ali should recall Richard Nixon, Joe Stalin, and the Little Corporal from Austria: they surrounded themselves with ‘yes men’ who played to their master’s egos, and look where those masters all ended up.
The point for the president is that some citizen, some engineer, some former president, some dissenter found disagreeable could most likely have some degree of raw intelligence and native wisdom that exceeds that of President Ali himself, and his entire band of advisers. I regret to inform the President that he and his circle of deniers register (even among his own) as lacking in testosterone, shallow in valor, and deathly anaemic where the powerful impulses of patriotism should be. I rarely find common ground with former President Ramotar, but clearly, he has Guyanese backs. There are tremendous differences with how former President Jagdeo manages the oil sector on which so much depends; it is what converts him into the worst of caricatures. If only he would listen, recognize his failures, pickup on his loss of face, then Guyana could get somewhere. To repeat: there is no value in making him look malevolent and impotent, and regarding his honest intents, which call for Nobel Prize winning tenacity, Herculean labours. I diminish the VP, and not one Guyanese benefits. Only Exxon does.
Now, it is my hard duty to inform President Ali and former President Jagdeo that they are presidents not advocates for Exxon. Whenever one Guyanese is mocked, the President (and VP) fulfills Exxon’s visions. To President Ali, I respectfully tender: listening more could lead to more learning, which could make living and governing cleaner, happier.
Sincerely,
GHK Lall