Pres Ali’s Heaven’s Gate -the Penultimate Chapter (IX)

THE 592 GUARDIAN♦ ACCOUNTABILITY JOURNALISM FOR GUYANA 

Pres Ali’s Heaven’s Gate -the Penultimate Chapter (IX)

OPINION. ♦ BY GHK. LALL 

Pres Ali has started.  Landgate.  Sheepgate.  Heaven’s Gate.  At the well-named Long Creek.  It’s a long story.  Having started, Pres Ali must continue.  Articulate more.  Represent more.  So that the air is sanitized.  So, that he himself emerges with distinction against the allegations laid next to his name.  I am with him.  But only insofar as he is committed to deal comprehensively with the Guyanese people.  Consider what follows.  Unemotionally.  Honestly.

It does not look well when a regular citizen is seeking a tiny slice of land to build a small homestead has to wait.  Count the days.  Mark his or her calendar.  For years.  But, in contrast, for their national leader, then a minister, to be associated with lands that are 200, 300, maybe as much as 500 times larger.  Bigger than what little people ask for to start a home for their small families.  A minister should not come in front of a villager, a renter, not even a lowly beggar.  His wait should not be shorter.  Not smoother.  I respectfully lay these considerations before Excellences Ali, Jagdeo, Nandlall.  Laws not men.  Processes not princes.  Consistent standards not seemingly schemes agitating to the peace.

For what is a minister that makes a great pole-vault forward?  A head of state.  He is now more than an oil head.  More than a hemispheric gas master.  More than a church minister or the president of a community committee. 

He is the president of the most-watched, most-talked about, most magnetic Oil Republic on the planet.  Therefore, it is in Pres Ali’s best interests to stand and deliver.  Landgate should not peter out in the manner of Vice-Gate.  The presidency is too sacrosanct a concept.  Too inviolable.  Even to be visited by the most delicate, most fleeting, fingernail’s touch.  That sullies its aura, its halo, its corona.  This is my free consultation for my president’s benefit.

  A development that oozes profuse sprawling grandeur calls for more than the president being his own policeman.  He can’t be.  Shouldn’t work that route.  Not have anything to do with such an approach.

His people will tell him what he wants to hear, what feathers their beds.  I tell him, as is.  On the president’s head now rests a world of the untoward.  Not becoming.  Definitely diluting of the standing that ought to be automatically associated with the presidency of this Republic. .

Now storied.  Now still ravaged, savaged, and hollowed out.  Naked before the world, stands Guyana.  How could the U.S. ambassador, or any High Commissioner, speak with authority about democracy and purity of any kind in Guyana?

How can even a mere commoner do so? Considering the still unended, still fully unaddressed, still nakedly undressed development at Long Creek?  In passing, I note that the lot number of this state within a state is related to one of the Burnham names.  Many sharp blows have been aimed at his name.  Time will provide the record of what’s said, done, now about this glorious (or gross) development.  What now transcends this land, as Guyana’s premier protected nature reserve.

These considerations I place at the feet of Excellency Ali, my president.  Heroic to many. Avoid transforming that into a horror for more.  Much trust hangs in the balance.  The air is unsettled.  Much benefit extended.  Maybe I overextended.  Let none of that go to waste, Excellency.  Mr. Mohamed, a political opponent, has spoken.  For himself.  For probably 110,000 Guyanese.  Likely others.                                                                                                        I speak for none, other than every landless, foodless, spiritless, hopeless citizen of Guyana. 

I trust that there’s no Guyanese so crass as to deny me that momentary indulgence.  My best to Pres Ali.