DR. CHEDDIE JAGAN remains the most pleasant and admirable leader Guyanese politics has produced. The enduring theory about Jagan was that he was a good human that was incapable of being discriminatory, arrogant and authoritarian.
It is difficult to assess his four years in power because of two reasons. He inherited a political economy and political sociology that were not flowing and gushing, and he needed time to plan his re-shaping.

Secondly, he didn’t have that time, so there was no settling down period, so he could have buckled down to his transformative agenda. In the case of Dr. Irfaan Ali, Guyana’s 2023 political economy bears little resemblance to Guyana in the period 1992 to 1997 when Dr. Jagan ruled.
Dr. Ali has far greater room for maneuverability to plan his holistic transformation. In those three years, he has gone beyond the boundary, and it is my assessment as both a political analyst and social activist whose years of experience take more than half a century, that Guyana may be on the verge of getting one of the better leaders in global politics.
It is almost impossible that if he is in good health in 2025 not to be the PPP’s presidential candidate.

Any competent political analyst assessing the political sociology of Guyana would defy rationality and logic to conclude that Dr. Ali would lose the 2025 poll. What this means is that with seven more years at his disposal, the new Guyana, the new political culture, the new way of us looking at ourselves, and the new way of the world looking at us will be with this nation, and in that context, this young man would have taken his place not in Guyanese history only, but also in the pages of the general textbook on leadership and transformative changes.
As I wrote above, my experience is over 55 years and in that period, I think a capacity has emerged in me to extract a feeling from my psychology about the mind of leaders in this country that I have interfaced with.

I sat down with Dr. Ali last Friday after I requested to see him to right a wrong that involved a lack of conscience on the part of a certain big-wig.
I only got that feeling of goodness and greatness about a human being lurking inside my psychology when the conversation flowed with five other persons in my entire life – Cheddi Jagan, Anil Nandlall, Father Andrew Morrison, the Jesuit priest that was the editor of the Catholic Standard, Sister Mary Noel Menezes, the Sister of Mercy history professor at UG, and Yesu Persaud.
Friday morning was one of the revelations I have had in my life. As he spoke to me, I listened, and my mind was in concentrated moods. My sensory perception was in overdrive. I was old enough to know I was seeing and talking and listening to a unique person that will achieve greatness.

You tend to feel it with your advanced age because that is what experience teaches you. I was right about Nandlall. He was a young lad in my philosophy class at UG, and everything about his expressions in tutorial sessions told me this was going to be a youth that is going to achieve greatness in his career. I get the same feeling when I am in deep conversation with the Guyanese president.
Could he end up being the definitive Third World leader that the post-colonial world has not yet seen? He has some serious competitors in Nehru from India; Manley from Jamaica; Bishop from Grenada; Nyerere from Tanzania; Mandela from South Africa; Lula from Brazil, among others.

I have excluded Burnham and Hoyte from Guyana; Castro from Cuba; and Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore because they had authoritarian instincts in which their leadership was marked by very wrong things done to their respective countries; for example Hoyte and the highly questionable 1985 election.
But Dr. Ali has seven years more to fill these big shoes. If he keeps the ship steady as he has been doing over the past three years, there is no reason why he cannot emerge as “numero uno” in CARICOM’s history and take his huge place in the annals of Third World evolution.

This week marked his third year in government, and I say with a tinge of emotion, you have to be an immoral soul unworthy of social acceptance if you cannot see that he has achieved a remarkable performance as a leader that reaches out to his population, interacts with them and tries to deliver to them what they ask for. But I guess there are those too evil to accept that others are greater than them.