IRFAAN ALI , THE EXCEPTIONAL (at What?)

Irfaan Ali the Exceptional (at what?)

OPINION 

BY: GHK LALL 

From shoveling away sludge to clear the way to braving the treacherous rapids of Guyana, there is the man on top of the world -Mohamed Irfaan Ali.  He is a far cry from the shaky lad who flew out of Leonora.  What a goose pimple-raising leader, a character straight out of Mark Twain, with some touches of Dickens thrown in to add to the grimness of his times, the froths stirred by his passage.

Parts of Guyana are set to be plunged into a reign of darkness.  Its president is trapped by lightheadedness.  Floating here, cavorting there.  Let there be light, said a celestial voice. 

Dr. Ali was all for it in the beginning (transparency), then he chickened out.  For what purposes?  Expose all of the PPP’s dirty laundry?  No one is that daft.  Blame the Turkish powerboat people, blame the blackouts hovering over the horizon.  But blackouts have a purpose. 

Keep the population in darkness, so that it is riven by the blankness of ignorance.  An ignorant citizenry is an obedient set of people.  What they don’t know can’t hurt them. 

To repeat my prior assurances: don’t get hot under the collar, fellow Guyanese.  The lights will stay on.  The people will get their new rates.  All will be well.  It is why Ali is so cavalier.  Pay the people, and be done with it.  Guyana doesn’t quibble over a million or few these days.  There’s a positive to the Turkish powerboat storm in a teacup: the PPP and Dr. Ali get to stick it to Guyanese.  Right in the kisser.  Who went the extra mile?  The PPP and Ali.  Who made the hard sacrifice?  The PPP and Ali.  I would do the same, too, using other people’s money.  Remember I said it first: Ali the Exceptional.

Ai-yai-yai!  This is a funny, tricky, nasty, sickly, and sleazy country.  Guyana really is. 

I lost track of the billions set aside for agriculture and drainage in budget after budget, when $240 billion was surpassed.  Ashni Singh did his usual magic with the numbers.  Only for the Ministry of Drainage to do a number on Guyanese.  Those who were pro-PPP since birth are now pro-WIN since the rains started and can’t seem to stop.  Check it out, good people.  Over US$1 billion, and the skies sneeze too long, and Guyana transforms into a rising wall of water all over.  I have been at airports that were snowed under.  Never saw one that was flooded out.  Lived through a few small sliders in snowed over runways.  Don’t want to think of landing on, or taking off from, one that the rains converted to a foot deep swimming pool.  Nerves and aging don’t go well.  Like trying bush rum and ice cream as a smoothie.

Thunderstorms hovering and threatening.  Turkish lightning rearing up and preparing to have a go.  And where is Pres Ali? 
He is on a new working campaign trail that he is busy trying out. 

Excellency Ali’s head is already fixed on 2030 (with handpicked contender at side), while flooded out citizens fear thinking of 20:30 tonight, and how they are going to manage.  To see.  To read.  To cook (if the money was there for the ingredients).  Before that, it’s how to keep dry.  To learn to sleep on a waterbed.

 When the gods want to punish people, they give them oil.  Then, to complete the circle of horrors, the people are given partners and leaders to drive them up a wall.  Or six feet dungeons. 

The people in Iran worry about bunker buster bombs.  The people in Guyana worry about partners and leaders.  I have heard about water near the heart and in the lungs.  Never came across water in the brain.  It is the special sickness that seems to strike prolifically at Guyana’s cohort of politicians.  Ethnicity aside, it must be hereditary. 

Meanwhile, Guyana’s boy wonder, Irfaan Ali, is now a fleet admiral, a marine biologist, and an Olympian aquatic astronaut.  Talk about exceptional, and Ali is he.