Playing The PPP Game, Then Distancing, Last Indifference

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Playing The PPP Game, Then Distancing, Last Indifference

OPINION BY: GHK LALL— September 2026

There’s a human tragedy.  Cotton Tree and two cousins.  Across Mandarin Bridge and an 11-year-old-child.  Police killings in Linden.  And, more lately, a boat that went down and took down over 100 Guyanese lives.  Poor ones.  The rich ones and big ones don’t sail, they soar.  A flight is ‘fine change’ for them.  The PPP Govt has a practice. 

Entourages roll into communities, before families.  Amidst human tragedy, caravans, and human dramas.  Political ones that follow a canned formula, a set procedure, what are now standard operations.  Follow the threads.

Visits.  Handholding.  Solemn expressions.  Proper clothing.  Words and carriage matching.  Police or politicians.  By golly, the PPP creates new science.  All that’s desired is truth and justice.  Hopes for truth and a sincere quest for justice are all that’s placed before visitors and professional mourners.  Political ones are the best.  Done!  Will be done! 

Guaranteed with seal of public oath affixed.  Repeated.  Cotton Tree.  Tuschen.  Linden.  The national tsunami that was the capsizing, plunging, horror of the MV Barima.  Hope still stirs, springs.  Out of tragedy’s agonies, there will be duty to the people.  Truth and justice delivered.  Finality that brings blessed closure.  The ghosts of the stricken, fallen, find peace.  So, also the savaged spirits of families and communities.  So, begins and ends chapter one in the Guyana story of when tragedy stalks and the PPP Govt mount its rescue operation.  The first objective transcending all others is damage control.  Limit the spread.  Manage flareups that could incite more fallouts.

Chapter two reveals the hypocrisies that ran deep amid the solemnities, mourning, grieving, the speechmaking celebrating Guyanese resilience.  Theater in full swing, free political matinees for the masses.  Now, there’s distancing.  The machinery takes over.  PPP stars who were in the forefront, retreat, take distant seats.  To make themselves invisible, no stains reach. 

A commission will be.  Guyanese hope.  The team is announced.  I discern a foul.  The sham registers deeply.  Are those the best?  Would this deliver?  What about trust?  Poor precedents exist.  Can’t be denied or wished away.  Try two: inferno, police mishaps.  The fire killed children; gunfire killed adults.  Whatever the objectives of those blood sacrifices, this is incontestable: the dead is still dead.  Something is conspicuous.  Where are those who were in the grieving vanguard?  To where have they disappeared?  Practice and process are the new headliners, with the right breed of people in place.

Prior whitewashes set to be repeated.  One dead, two dead, a hundred dead, it’s only a number.  Nothing to get worked up about.  It’s the new line of those who promised truth and justice.  That is, if they break their silence, narrow their distance.  Gruesome murders are ancient history.  A child drowned in mysterious circumstances, and the usual business continues.  Killings by the State, roll with them.  A hundred sent to their death, through criminal negligence at every level. 

Yet those fingered are three poor working men, left with no choice.  Perhaps, that calumny (an official crime by itself) is all the truth and justice that families and Guyanese will ever get.  A travesty amidst tragedy.  Thus, the concerted effort at distancing.  Put a COI in the middle, one that developed a hernia and emergency appendicitis.  But that’s not all; a ruff case of tonsilitis has affected the Barima COI.  Can’t move.  Can’t talk.  Can’t collect its wits, can’t get its wheels rolling.  A month later.

Stretch out, so that there can be proper straining out.  The negatives.  The inconveniences.  The revealing memories.  A month later, and there is official indifference.  It’s the COI business, not that of leadership.  It’s of dead Guyanese.  Nobodies.  Why work up a sweat?  Why go near to what can bite?  Indifference confirms what I always pegged to insincerity.  Hypocrisy.  The pretense of shared pain overcome by political indifference.  The MV Barima is dynamite.  Whoever goes near to it risks being blown up.  Thus, the distancing first, and now the indifference.

Cruelty amid raw tragedy.  The reprehensible walking side-by-side with the indefensible.  The PPP way of life.

MV Barima -Silence and Sloth

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MV Barima –Silence and Sloth (real Terms of Reference)

OPINION BY: GHK LALL September 2026

The death plunge of the MV Barima qualifies as a national catastrophe; an unprecedented local human tragedy.  Obvious beyond argument, above denial.  Yet, in its grim aftermath, there’s the reverse of what should be happening.  With intensity and honesty.  With frequency in duty to families and country.  Where, when, and how have those been?  Instead, the strategies and tactics of PPP Govt operators have centered on two prongs that sabotage a disaster of this numerical, emotional, grimness. 

The prongs are silence and sloth.  Both have slippery, tricky objectives.  Both also represent another fork with two pointed horns.

Silence in this small country for a tragedy as big as the MV Barima exposes its purveyors.  Resonates piercingly in the tiny national echo chamber.  From mouth to mouth and ear to ear.  Guyana is that interconnected.  Everyone is on the same time zone, the same platform.  Why silence?  What’s there to fear?  To hide?  The PPP brass should have learnt what other government did belatedly. 

Silence doesn’t suppress.  Silence attracts attention.  Silence intrigues.  Why silence after the great, excessive outpouring of manufactured pieties from the head-of-state to those who head nothing, to others who can’t account for their own heads?

Then, there’s the twin of silence.  Sloth is its name.  Astonishingly, sloth in the murky wake of 100 dead, and hundreds wrapped in wrenching mourning.  Like silence, what purpose sloth?  Sloth confirms that there is much to rearrange and reset; much to cleanup and coverup.  Sloth buys time and space.  Silence furnishes the blanket.  I foresee a Commission of Inquiry (COI) on a tortured journey to nowhere.  An indication of my contempt re delivery on its terms of reference.  Wherever the journey takes, make it look real.  Most importantly, chart a course that doesn’t take to the bottom of this Guyana horror story. 

I use nautical expressions.  For the MV Barima was of nautical life; and a nautical death that shouldn’t have happened, and what sits like a bloody crown on the head.

Getting to the very bottom of the MV Barima’s death spiral would raise up the worm-eaten, snake bitten, and the bitter.  Bodies are not involved.  A cruel and inhuman PPP Govt is.  Recklessness, criminal negligence, orphaned again.  Who would own up to such failures?  Which leader, which lackey? 

Hence, silence and sloth flourish.  Drag this COI out.  Go about its demands, expectations, on the quietest feet.  A month after the swearing-in of the COI, hands are still stuck on Bible, Koran, Bhagavad Gita.  (Or the Devil’s dictionary).  Scripture records some struck with dumbness or paralysis.  It is clear that both have taken up residence in MV Barima Guyana.

Gone but not Forgotten -several victims still unrecovered

The second jagged and twisted horn on the silence and sloth fork is less tangible, less immediate.  It is more ordinary, more of the usual that informs about Guyana so brilliantly.  The weaknesses of silence and sloth: they don’t fool, don’t work.  The deeper the silence, thicker the sloth, the longer that farm and its Garden of Eden inhabitants avoid the limelight, dodge the spotlight’s harsh glare.  Call this whatever pleases.  Skepticism.  Cynicism.  Hair-raising rhythms of Guyana’s political life.  Nothing is innocent, pure.  Guyanese taught how ulterior motives and hidden agendas are inseparable from official life.  I applaud the PPP.  A farm shielded, steered from harm’s way.  Momentarily only.  Silence and sloth on Barima afford space to move around, tidy up, and closeout loose grass on that farm.

Last, silence and sloth facilitate the eerie.  Create atmospherics, provide distance, instill dread.  Convert the MV Barima into a ghost ship.  Ancient superstitions unearthed.  Citizens flinch.  Speak in hushed, fearful tones.  Voices heard crying.  Shadows screaming for justice.  Observers on land shrinking, retreating.  Amid a grey, grim time, remembrance comes. 

The 1970s Argentinian junta conducted its Dirty War against Argentines.  In this century, the PPP wages its Dirty War on Guyanese.  Silence and sloth now weaponized against citizens. 

To its watery grave went the MV Barima and its human cargo.  To its unmarked grave that COI, with silence shrouding, and sloth contributing to its stillborn existence, and ghastly death.

 

 

 

 

Mac Maharaj – Guyana needs a few

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Mac Maharaj – Guyana needs a few

OPINION BY : GHK LALL —August 2026

Mac Maharaj.  Knew the name.  South Africa, Mandela.  Apartheid, the struggle.  Then, 592Guardian shared a piece on Saturday, and I realize that I didn’t know the man at all.  There’s a biography of him in the house, somewhere among the thousands of other books.  Must find and read.  If only to gather what made him tick, what made him stick through the barrage of brutality he absorbed.

Sathyandranath “Mac” Maharaj. A South African Revolutionary.

Thanks to 592Guardian, I got a sketch of Mr. Maharaj.  The fighter for freedom.  Against the depraved and bestial.  Long odds for people with a short stick, a few bricks, to stand in defiance against a well-equipped killer army coming after them.  With blood in its eye.  Hate in its heart.  And inhumanity in its corpse of a soul.  But Mac Maharaj was one of those men and women with an indomitable will, and a spirit that just couldn’t be defeated.  By racists of the worst sort.  By demagogues who would kill a man, and burn a village, then kneel in church, worship their gods, and go home to their families.

They hung him from the seventh floor of a high-rise building.  From a window he dangled, held by one ankle.  He didn’t cave.  For almost sixty days, he was tortured, then beaten unconscious, left with a paralyzed arm.  And still, this man of steel, Mac Maharaj, would not yield.  Not a whisper, not a syllable, would he give to his animalistic inquisitors.  Nothing.  Nothing.  After a dozen years in one of those South African dungeons and fortresses that was specially reserved for the hardheaded and hard of hearing, he was released from Robben Island.  To Swaziland, he escaped.  From there he carried on the fight that lasted just under two long, grim, unending decades more.

Mac Maharaj was a man among a band of glorious men and martyrs, a pack of patriots that never knew the word surrender.  Mandela and Tutu towered above them all.  South Africa is different because of them, and their sacrifices.  The world is a better place, for their unceasing fighting spirit.  They made a pact with the despairing, denied, and degraded Black and colored people of South Africa.  And they never walked back, never even looked back for a fleeting second.  The thought of crossing the floor and shaking hands with the devils (Malcolm X), never surfaced.  Despite the prods and electric shocks, the stone killers and the wormy white politicians.  They persevered through all the punishments that were thrown against them.

I cross oceans.  Redirect gaze from Capetown  to Georgetown.  What Guyana has makes me want to spit first, then puke.  Men and women made of mincemeat.  Froth.  And a financial calculator for a brain.  They throw in the towel, as soon as pressures brace.  They climb backsteps.  Roll across floors.  Lick boots.  Excellence in leadership.  When hunger multiplies.  While poverty stretches, intensifies.  Their own people betrayed and sabotaged.  It’s for the country.  I say it’s for the money.  I say it’s for the rewards of sucking up and brownnosing. 

And still thinking that there is no smearing.  Across face.  Across now rancid existence.  The simple people committed to, the simple people that trusted, now sold out for a clap on the back and a book of dirty deeds to do to prove oneself.

Where are their guts that don’t deflate, the stones in them that don’t shatter?  Cheddi Jagan and Walter Rodney could have plastered a foolish grin on their faces and toadied up to the powers of their time.  The thought never crossed, and neither did they.  What kind of men do Guyana have today?  But those that plot the quickest and easiest way out.  Why wait and miss the boat, find the gate closed?  Seize the moment and spring out like a jack-in-the-box to the life of a puppet, or some disparaged flunkey.  A mannequin on display in a lingerie showcase. 

The fight has gone out of those who signed up, who stood before the people, and swore to them: your pain is my pain, your struggle is mine.  Until they collapsed in cowardly submission.  Until the carrots dangled proved too much to resist.  Guyanese want life at the top.  Ease, no squeeze.  Crawling through mud and heat and sleaze is for people of stronger dispositions. 

More principled and patriotic makeup.  Like a Mac Maharaj, and a Mandela.  Guyana’s honest and honorable fell first.  The strong and the brave succumbed long before, and in more numbers now.

Constitutional Reform Comm. -Ram on the Rampage

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Constitutional Reform Comm. -Ram on the Rampage

OPINION BY :GHK LALL– August 2026

Chartered Accountant, attorney-at-law, and civil society watcher, Mr. Chris Ram, certainly went to town on the Constitutional Reform Commission (CRC) in Kiskadee Watch (“Carl Singh-led Constitutional Reform Commission is already a colossal failure with no reasonable prospect of redemption”) -August 24,2026.  A hammer to the head, that one is.  Mr. Ram’s list of failures is exhaustive, a commission far from reform mode, one afflicted by crises.  It would be interesting to hear how the CRC’s members respond.  I stand this way.

Two years post its swearing-in, there must be something to show.  Nothing.  Chairman Singh, SC, has a duty to differ, set the record in order.  Attorney General Nandlall, SC, spoke of holding people’s feet to the fire (my words), i.e., they must deliver.  Not on their timecard.  But through what gives value for money, moves the CRC forward.  Talk about money, and I swear.  Jesus Christ! Public service has always been bemoaned as an impoverishing undertaking. 

In contrast, public service is delicious in Guyana.  I look at Mr. Ram’s monthly compensation numbers and curse.  For doing what?  It’s a blasted parttime job done halftime, and the monthly payment numbers are in six figures, with the chair benefiting from an extra zero.  It’s a sweet setup.  The CRC had delivered, produced some substance, and I still would not agree at the level of remuneration for its members.  Where’s the output for the annual outlay of $74.4 million in compensation alone?  From my distance, it seems that real money only circulates at certain elevations.  I am only commenting on this, and I’m embarrassed at the abundance of riches.  If a minimum wage worker in Guyana delivered as much as the CRC, he would be out of a job.  It’s my take.

Also, why are some of them on the CRC?  Who in Guyana’s population are they representing?  Then, there’s the other side of that question.  A group that garnered almost 110,000 votes a year ago is locked out of the CRC, forced to look on. 

How can Guyana still be considered a democracy, when the state of the CRC and many other areas of vital national importance are this ramshackle? 

Personally speaking, Guyana is now nothing but a house of disputed repute.  I appreciate that when the CRC came into being political conditions were different.  No one saw coming what has been rightly labeled the seismic change.  It’s now a year since the last elections, and Guyanese voters have shown where they stand.  Why are the people with 110,000 votes effectively barred from being around the CRC table?  Why are others inside of the body, collecting what equates to free money?

Two more points before I go.  Mr. Ram mentioned that “the commission and its members are entitled to the same privileges and immunities as the National Assembly and its members.”  I am trying to grasp the extent of his meaning.  Does this mean that the 21 members of the CRC are each entitled to a duty-free concession?  If so, it’s the equivalent of sleeping on the job, then springing awake to run to the wharf to clear the next Mercedes on Guyanese taxpayers’ backs.  The CRC has gravitated to being an assignment with all the rewards, but with no returns forthcoming.  I would hide my face, leave through a backdoor.

Last point, recall my prior take about keeping the money in the family.  There’s the CRC secretary.  Given his attachment to the MV Barima Commission of Inquiry, he must be Guyana’s Superman and Spiderman combined.  A saver of distressed souls; and a scaler of vertical fortifications, through stockinged feet.  He is in the middle of a human tragedy and a boardroom catastrophe.  I think he’s the right man for both jobs. 

The output of the CRC gives an indication of what could be had from the Barima COI.  Guyana isn’t a country.  It’s a tragicomedy.  Ram presented splendid testimony.  I do some mopping up work.

Segregating, Steering, and Weeding out Undesirables

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Segregating, Steering, and Weeding out Undesirables

OPINION BY: GHK LALL – August 2026

What are those people doing here?  Yes, those people!  Why does space have to be shared with them in restaurants and supermarkets?  This great, sweaty, unwashed mass of bottom-of-the-barrel Guyanese.  I don’t think that Exxon’s people, others in that classification, would be so undiplomatic. They wouldn’t be caught dead pronouncing so vehemently (what could be interpreted otherwise) on ordinary Guyanese seeking a glimpse of what it is to live large.  How locals and foreigners live on the cream of oil rich Guyana. 

Not one would do so publicly in these politically correct, supersensitive times.  The PPP Govt, however, is concerned about the masses intruding in places with special ambience.  Coming uncomfortably close to Guyana’s rich and famous.  Upscale supermarkets and restaurants should be off-limits for those who can’t afford them.  If supermarkets and restaurants today, is the PPP Govt’s scheme to segregate, to steer, and to weed out Guyanese undesirables could it  spread to real estate.  Guyanese receive early clues of a bunker mentality, a state where silos proliferate.  Or, as said in another writing, a creeping form of economic eugenics.  Cull the unworthy.  Oust Guyana’s ordinary.

Inviting affordability but Forbidden?

Poor Guyanese aspire.  They have oil.  They wish to elevate themselves.  A bag of foreign bread; cookies for the kids.  Ow, let the people sample nah maan.  They may not have the money, but they have ambition.  Who doesn’t want better?  Who does want for their children to have a better life than them?  Now, even that’s frowned upon, found fault with, denounced.  What’s the objective?  If the foreigners have serious problems with their own compatriots in their native lands, how much tolerance can they have for Guyanese?  Raucous, boisterous, Guyanese.

Frankly, what I see underway is a push to separate the rich from the poor, the princely from the pathetic, and the people in the penthouses from the people on the pavement.  Objections, anyone?  The word from above is, forget about sharp, slick malls, with wide aisles and lushly stocked shelves.  Even the shopping carts have an air about them.  Stick to the Bourda Market Mall.  Fetch basket and stay there. 

The richest class in Guyana has the money.  They should be able to spend in comfort in the supermarkets and restaurants of their choice.  Not have to mix and mingle with Guyanese minions.  Nothing sours a slug of Johnnie Walker Blue than contemplating the closeness of commoners.  Adolf called them undesirables.  Uncle Joe termed them parasites.  In India and Rwanda, cockroach has gained traction.

So, what is beginning to take shape in Oil Guyana?  I think it is segregating, steering, and weeding out the multitudes from the midst of the majestic.  Stay in corner.  Be contented among own kind.  It came glossily packaged.  Care and concern for the welfare of Guyanese overdoing things.  It’s a sign of the future.  The segregated Guyana state is becoming more audible.  They only thing left to be done, to communicate what should be, is to hangout a three-word notice in front of restaurants and supermarkets.  No coloreds allowed.  Real estate communities were the first casualties.  Now it’s exclusive eateries (or what should stay that way) and shopping emporiums that Guyana’s poor better not set foot inside.  Not even the parking lot.  A subtle warning was already given.

 

Follow the facts.  Separate schools for the moneyed class and foreign contingents.  Queen’s College isn’t good enough.  Separate places for giving birth for PPP highfliers.  Guyana’s world-class medical facilities, not so world-class, after all.  The rich cabal wants their own reserved spaces.  The upwardly mobile wants more oil action for themselves.  Both hold their noses around the lower orders, seek to keep them at a distance.  Keep them in the barrios and ghettoes.  Let them frolic there. 

Nudge them away from plush restaurants and fancy supermarkets.  It’s how Guyana’s higher side lives.  The segregating and steering of Guyanese have begun.  Weeding out of undesirables more vocal. 

I submit, Guyana is now a bunker state.  A state of silos.  One hell of a sick, sorry, state.

Cold and cruel, there stands the PPP Govt

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  Cold and cruel, there stands the PPP Govt

OPINION BY :GHK LALL –August 2026

Observe people riddled with insecurity.  Brutalized by broad swaths of poverty.  Upended by their own naivety.  Made into sitting ducks by their own vulnerability (and their own heroes).  Always ready game, never less than prone, to their dependency.  Play with their minds.  Shower them with barrels of self-guilt.  Prompt them to feel shame.  Feel sorry for themselves.  Use them to abuse themselves, a flogging first, then flapping about uncertainly.  What to do?  Why even this tiny luxury taken away?  This cannot be life in an oil rich country, the Guyana Oil Eldorado.  Just can’t be.  But the man said so, and the man must know.  This much I know.  What is being dished out to poor, hurting, scrambling, dragging, giving up Guyanese is representative of the cold and cruel.  It is an essential element of the PPP Govt’s barbarous calculus.  Throw the cost-of-living burden, price agonies, right back at them, into their sad, sick faces.

Eating out in tony restaurants is for the well-bankrolled, the superrich PPP political class.  Don’t hang hat where hand can’t reach.  Low-class and working-class are low-class and working-class.  Know thy place.  Understand thy limits. 

It’s a real smaat maan who speaks.  Plenty university.  The man in control of the money.  Enough has been given.  Government isn’t the answer.  Government isn’t a babysitter.  The PPP certainly isn’t, has not a scrap of interest. 

There is the contractor class to be taken care of; and big private sector operators to assist towards greater prosperity.  Have a care people.  They provide the jobs.  So, what if they are minimum wage, unlivable wage, jobs?  Just start thinking of, begin working on, abandoning those once-a-month, often once-a-quarter, dreams and plans to eat out and give the children some joy.  Even the little that those pushed into the category of losers in Guyana have is taken away from them. 

Cold and callous.  It’s part of the PPP Govt calculus.  Which government that still has its head on, desires to take ownership of cost-of-living crises, and its wide trail of devastation?  Maybe the government of leading men in sacred texts.  But none should look to the PPP Govt to embrace that duty.  What’s in it for the PPP, other than less money to pilfer, less milk for its fat cats?

Eating in swanky restaurants is bad enough.  But shopping in pricey supermarkets is an uber horror.  Very risky business.  Especially in a cost-of-living country that destroys its people, and a PPP Govt that eats its young, and all those that it afflicts and cripples.  Guyana is a cold and cruel place.  Capitalism devouring, taking no prisoners.  At the pinnacle of the pyramid is a PPP Govt that publicly cheers its own predatory nature.  Buy at the greens and veggie markets.  Kiss supermarkets goodbye.  Are some owners of some of those bigshot establishments not friends of the farmlands (and its products) that have caused such uproars?  Special invitees of the PPP Govt?  Apparently, their only utility is when it’s time for financial support.  Or the force of a shakedown. 

Recall what is repeated, emphasized: the PPP Govt is cold and cruel.  A stalker.  Then bushwhacker.  Collect millions from donors.  Then harass ordinary people for only window shopping at foreign and local supermarkets.  It takes a government of exceptionally low and dirty character to engage in such double-cross.  I believe that the PPP Govt is refining its own form of economic eugenics.  Start with segregating and weeding out the undesirable classes.  (More on this coming).

Reality check.  Can sane Guyanese see street level, entry level, minimum wage level locals even thinking of exchanging bhagee for Brussel sprouts?  Or cassava for caviar and pumpkin for mushrooms?  I feel for fellow Guyanese.  Whipped and flayed by their own to keep them in their place.  Their lot is worse than that of children.  Grown Guyanese shouldn’t be seen nor heard.  Nor should they be seen shopping and eating where the higher classes that have arrived now thrive. 

Like I said, the PPP Govt is extraordinarily infused with the cold and callous.  It’s the ultimate in political savagery.

Ms. Afeefa Ally -what a wonderful Guyanese story

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Ms. Afeefa Ally –what a wonderful Guyanese story

OPINION BY; GHK LALL–August  2026

Hers is one of those great, big, feel good stories.  The achievement of Ms. Afeefa Ally brings a glow.  Of delight at her overachievement.  Splendidly done, Ms. Ally.  She now stands as a role model for others.  Through can do energy.  Becoming an inspiration for the challenged.  A standard of going forth and never looking back, never giving up.  Amid all the highfliers at this year’s CSEC rite of passage for Guyanese youths, Ms. Ally’s story is the one that will stay with me.  One that I will use as a reference, when I hear excuses.  When I see shrinking and complaining about all that is wrong with the world and unfair about life.

For me, Ms. Afeefa Ally’s seven subjects represent more than a hard-earned milestone.  It is a monument to determination and dedication.  At the risk of gross exaggeration, it is several times the number of subjects that she earned.  The stars aligned.  The system in the home came together, worked.  The support system in the school overperformed.  From teachers and friends.  From a 59-year-old grandmother to the daily journey to be back in a school again. 

A helping hand.  A comforting presence.  A familiar companion.  Too often, the worse that Guyana has to offer is on display.  Very quietly, this young lady toiled in the CSEC trenches and emerged smelling like a rare rose.  Seven Grade Ones, three grade twos.  Guyanese have every cause to be proud of her work ethic, her outstanding achievement against the odds.  Despite the hand that fate has dealt her. 

I am proud of Afeefa Ally.  Her achievement is Guyana’s achievement.  I feel like it is mine.

I would like to suggest that the Government of Guyana search for ways on how it could render a hand to her in this her now post CSEC years.  I wish there were more stories like hers.  Of the students from various indigenous communities, who rise above their environment of destitution and ever so often official depravity.  Of the children from broken or abusive homes, who tarried on relentlessly, and kept the midnight oil burning.  Of those hopefuls laboring in neighborhoods where the noise of the music peals to the equivalent of an atomic explosion, and where alcohol and other substances of unrestrained merriment are the order of the day and the long hours of the night. 

I can visualize the candle going down to its last flicker, and a head resting exhaustedly and uneasily on a small table so laden with books.  An age so suffused with hope.  Education for poor Guyanese is more than about the future.  It is about the richness of the oxygen that, at times, can be so difficult to encounter, then infinitely more of a struggle to inhale.

I love these kinds of stories.  The challenge for me is that they are so far apart.  A lonely trickle here, a lost episode in some forlorn corner of Guyana.  It is why they are cherished the more, and an Afeefa Ally stands as Guyana’s latest golden child.  Except that she is one that is different.  Numbers that are small in comparison.  An institution that is not usually among those hailed and heralded, that owns and controls the spotlight year after year.  From an area that is some distance from the busy, on the run, up in the clouds, metropolis.  

A separate word is due to her grandmother.  It is some sacrifice, those days.  In itself, one that I cannot remember coming across in my time here, or travels elsewhere.  At least, she could read, so she was in a position to help.  And help she did with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of patience, and something else. 

There has to be some love in there.  A deep, abiding, love.  We shall see this through together.  Ms. Afeefa Ally and her grandma did.  This is as grand as it gets.  There are still these types of Guyanese that inspire hope deep inside.

Change Eating Habits -Seriously, Pres Ali?

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Change Eating Habits -Seriously, Pres Ali?

OPINION BY: GHK LALL – August 2026

Pres Ali means well.  I wonder, though, whether he is serious.  Or, if he takes himself seriously.  I put it gently.  He should listen to himself.  The parts of his speeches that are not AI influenced.  (Follow-up planned).  Change eating habits.  Well-intended.  But, Swiss cheese.

First, there must be a range of food options before people can change their eating habits.  They have choices.  Food options found affordable, in the basket.  Bitter reality for a third to a half of Guyana (maybe) is that they don’t have enough to eat.  If there isn’t enough, what is there to change?

When Guyanese are down to the bone, what opening for changing their eating habits?  When there’s a scramble to put together a simple meal, changing eating habits, for better or worse, is a luxury that eludes.  The focus is on quantity, not quality.  Quality is also costly. 

It’s about bulkage and less about roughage.  Nutrition would be nice to have, but the emphasis is on avoiding starvation. 

Does a man lost in the jungle, or adrift on the ocean, get picky and choosy?  Whither that luxury?  Especially when the only food around is the dead body of a past companion.  The president and his people disagree with me on plenty; I don’t think they can disagree on this point.

Second, Pres Ali took aim at ‘eating out.’  Sure, it’s expensive.  But if the masses don’t treat themselves, now and then, make the sacrifice, then how do investors flocking here recoup their cash?  Guyana has been marketed as business friendly.  Why transform Guyana, the culinary and hospitality part, to being bad for business? 

There’s a contradiction there.  I seek pardoned for tabling.  Some Guyanese use alcohol (other stuff) to numb their senses, relieve the pain of living in Guyana.  Others seek a bite to make them forget how hard it is in this luscious, fabulous, oil rich frontier that has the whole world drooling. 

While the whole world drools, it takes a hard man to shove locals away from what gives them some temporary ease.  See the children smile.

Instead of a Tylenol, poor Guyanese address their migraine and stomach pangs with a Taco or burrito, a burger or pizza.  I’m not talking about Japanese sushi, beluga caviar, or Hungarian goulash for Guyanese who struggle to get enough to eat.  Me, I am a roti and curry man, a peas and rice man.  So, it’s perplexing that the president (who should know better) suddenly is the new voice for a change in local eating habits.  I doubt that anyone could have imagined that presidential call in an oil rich country.  Here a billion is gone through by the PPP Government as if it’s a bottle of rum guzzled down, then to the next?  Meanwhile, poorer Guyanese, chronically short of funds and food, are counseled to change how they eat.

Third, it’s unlikely that Guyanese minimum wage workers, or local pensioners, or lower tier public servants even think of shopping at the high-end supermarkets.  Their minds may wander and settle on the wonders in those high-end and high-priced shops.  Reality check: when prices at municipal markets embarrass them, chase them home, what interest can they have about partaking of expensive goodies in supermarkets?

Fourth, the president and the PPP hierarchy are forever celebrating some new commercial arrival, some splendid ribbon cutting, some promising sod turning.  Now, there is this development that amounts to:  Beware of Supermarkets.  Bypass those megastores.  The Chinese put Guyanese corner shops out of business.  Remaining options, anyone?  What about those investors who plunked down their millions in the calculation that Guyanese sample their goods?  I hope that local entrepreneurs (supermarkets) aren’t included.

In reading what Pres Ali said, I recall that local beauty.  Belly full maan tell hungry belly maan -bare yuh chafe, bruddah.  Ting gun be bettah.  The mystery: change when there’s nothing.

Pres Ali’s Procurement Rap, New Song Sung

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Pres Ali’s Procurement Rap, New Song Sung

OPINION BY: GHK LALL– August 2026

Those visits by Pres Ali into places of worship may be paying off.  He sees the light.  He may insist that he sees god (meaning himself); I settle for light.  Light is late in coming.  Its speed slowed down by GPL wires and thick political darkness.  But light has arrived in Guyana and it struck Pres Ali first. 

Opposition and civil society could participate in the national procurement process, part of the oversight mechanism.  Now lightning has struck me.  Really?  After a half decade of PPP cronies and family members ripping off billions from the treasury and reaming Guyanese taxpayers, it may be time for the Opposition and civil society to be involved.  Not in the teefin, but in the new PPP stop the stealing campaign.

Pres Ali wouldn’t be Pres Ali if he didn’t see an opportunity to showcase his cute side.  Adorable he is not.  The national procurement setup has multi-stakeholder presences with little involvement by the government.  If the president is going to crack a joke, it should be one that makes Guyanese laff. 

His multi-stakeholder plot fell flat.  Hence, I beg to differ with him. 

Take a look fellow Guyanese, almost all of those so-called multi-stakeholder presences in the national procurement system are either beholden to the PPP Govt, or proxies for it.  When they are in procurement programs, the government has many seats at the table.  There is no need for a minister, or PPP flunkies.  Such would give away the storyline.  The evaluators are largely PPP loyalists or PPP indentured and indebted. 

Which one was going to go against the tide of corruption?

Recall how quickly the PPP got rid of Geoffrey Vaughn.  There were other components to his departure.  Recall Dr. Terrence Campbell and his exposé on how Oil Fund oversight really works.  One word is adequate enough: rubberstamp.  Recall how obstinate the same PPP Govt has been whenever the idea, the push, for opposition and/or civil society presences within the procurement system came up.  If the procurement system was pure, if it was untouched by politics, then non-PPP presences would have been seated already. 

There was nothing to hide.  No prearrangements to conceal.  No bloated pricing models to stuff under a seat.  No highly favored contractors calling after hours and outside of channels and claiming the right to be the winner of a tender.

Now I hear the government is pondering.  The law could be amended.  Recall what I said earlier about the Pres Ali seeing the light.  It took him a half decade plus to reach this place.  He had a dream.  In Georgetown, not Georgia.  Or, some pressure from foreign diplomats, with the Yankees leading.  Good, ole, Uncle Sam salvaging the situation, seeking to tidy up past messes between now and 2030.  

It’s evident that corruption has become so rampant it is now out-of-control.  Bidders make their own rules.  Evaluators finalize their own numbers.  The procurement system follows through with its eye on Freedom House and Office of the President.  Waiting for a signal, maybe.

The president mentioned the cabinet.  The cabinet doesn’t know its ankle (a euphemism) from its elbow.  Its members see a bid and they see dollars.  Friends due for a partnership, or shakedown. 

Bagmen who should come in for a piece of the action. 

I am sorry, but this business of the president and the cabinet finding religion overnight neither impresses nor inspires.  A bargain, perhaps, to sidestep or go easy on questionable PPP spending in the parliamentary Public Accounts Committee. 

The PPP does nothing for nothing.  There’s always a catch.  So, when I hear of the president with his latest sensationalism, two things register.  There’s a hidden trapdoor in this development of opposition and civil society presences in the procurement system. 

Certainly, the rewards are so rich that it may prove irresistible to some of the newcomers. 

By then, it’s too late.  Can’t say that the PPP using the procurement system fuh teef.  And, if there’s teefin, is nah dem alone teefin. 

Apologies, Excellency Ali.  Government tricks return to condemn.

Woods conveyed, Ali delayed

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592 GUARDIAN◊ACCOUNTABILITY◊INTEGRITY IN JOURNALISM◊GUYANA

Woods conveyed, Ali delayed

OPINION BY: GHK LALL– August 2026

I see a study in contrasts.  Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods burst out of his executive suite and conveyed the news.  Investment in Guyana fully recovered; all US$55 billion of it.  Two years early to crown some superb work.  Guyana’s CEO of Oil, Vice President, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, barricaded himself behind steel fences and locked doors.  He hasn’t shown his face, said a word, on that Exxon investment development. 

See what I mean by the foreign CEO conveyed, the local CEO delayed?  A study in contrasts, if ever there was one.

It took Guyana’s other CEO, Pres Irfaan Ali to break away from his government’s delay and relay that Guyana is finally in the money and collecting 39.5 percent in profits.  I am still working through what made that so hard to say so.  Now checkout this other contrast: Exxon was proud to proclaim to the world that its investment came back into the house bank a full two years ahead of time. 

On the Guyana side, it took 18 days before the PPP Govt, through CEO Ali, to break its silence on what has to qualify as an extraordinary event in Guyana’s ongoing oil story.  One CEO recouped his billions two years before schedule.  The Guyanese CEO took almost two years to repeat the same grand news to his people.  The 18-day delay to cut through the profit silence equates to almost two years by my reckoning.  Each day of silence was the equivalent of a monthlong delay.  This was news that belonged with Guyanese.  More than three times the oil earnings of the first six years of oil production must be a giant leap for Guyana, a great moment for Guyanese.                          Why withhold?  How can there be silence? 

Exxon’s investment repaid and Guyana set to climb the profit ladder cannot be a national security secret.  How so?  Who is so, ah, sloppy, to say so?

Before proceeding, permit me.  Appreciate and repeat for the record that Mr. Darren Woods was also selling himself as due for a nice raise for his lovely work.  Appreciate also that it took the PPP Govt so much time to decide what to say to Guyanese.  Three times present oil collections and then some more must have set the wheels spinning in Freedom House. 

What to do with all these new US billions tumbling into the Oil Fund?  In circumstances such as these, temptations soar.  National development priorities have proven to be a dud, worn thin.  I empathize.  A cash grant only utilizes so many US millions.  For the first time, I heard Pres Ali mentioning structure.  It seems that the MV Barima disaster jarred him awake, stuck some wisdom in him.  Too late. 

A legacy that was pathetic to begin with, now in tatters.  To quote local lingo: “dem nah gah watah fuh wash am.”  Play with fire.  End up in the crematory.

Nobody can say that I didn’t warn the PPP, which is why Dr. Jagdeo is so wrapped in silence at this exciting juncture.  He is working diligently to hold the party together.  Amid a sea of blatant corruption, ongoing starvation in sections of the population, and political families enriched from left to right to stragglers, the PPP General Secretary doesn’t have time for oil.  He either gets the party faithful in line quickly and conclusively, or many of his people (and others closer to home) could be looking at jail time. 

He knows that, which is why he has been missing in action from the conversation about 39.8 percent in profits.

A strange country this Guyana of ours.  Master presenter Darren Woods was all excitement about collecting back his company’s US$55 billion.  In contrast, Guyana with more billions coming in from a greater surge in American dollars is glummer than Droopy, that sad cartoon canine, and dimmer than Cinderella after she lost her slipper when the dancing was over. 

For people who love money, it’s a strange way in which the PPP celebrates Guyana’s change in fortunes.  Woods was all bubbly.  Ali was no less than rusty.  Something tells me that Guyanese are in trouble with their 39.8 percent windfall.