Dear Editor,
WHILE many leaders of industrialised and technologically advanced nations are toying with authoritarianism and advocating isolationist policies, President Mohamed Irfaan Ali and his administration are championing the cause of multilateralism.

It is a daunting task riddled with formidable obstacles, the least of which have been a number of adversarial western journalists.

VICE Media’s journalist Isobel Yeung had the audacity to employ an actor to sneak a hidden camera into VP Bharrat Jagdeo’s private residence in violation of well-established international journalistic standards and policies.

VICE Media declared bankruptcy in February, and Yeung is now out of a job. Shane Smith, VICE co-founder’s high-rolling playboy, once described by insiders as being all “smoke and mirrors”, lost billions of dollars when his company folded. Its other founder, Gavin MacInnes, gained notoriety for creating “Proud Boys”, a white supremacist organisation that was active during the January 6 (2021) Capitol Hill insurrection.

Gaiutra Bahadur, an English and journalism associate professor at Rutgers University in Newark and author of “Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture” penned an epic 6,000-word essay for the New York Times magazine (March 30, 2024) titled “Is Guyana’s Oil a Blessing or a Curse?”

The essay promises to explore “the consequences of climate change and the lure of the oil economy”. It is a predictable piece of disappointing journalism, and, not surprisingly, it was funded by the Headway initiative.

Among Headway’s financial backers are the Rockefellers, who made stupendous wealth from oil refineries, and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, a Greek-owned company that made billions from owning and operating what was once the world’s largest oil supertanker fleet.

In Bahadur’s essay, VP Jagdeo is referenced four times, but he was apparently never interviewed for the story. The author cited the fact that the United Nations once hailed Jagdeo as a “Champion of the Earth”.

The next sentence reads: “And then ExxonMobil struck oil.” The inference here is that Jagdeo is so intoxicated with oil that he no longer cares about the environment. Also conspicuously missing from Bahadur’s lopsided narrative is President Ali. His name is never mentioned in her lengthy essay.

This brings us to Stephen Sackur, host of the popular BBC television programme, ‘HARDtalk’, with the same predictable line of questioning: Blame Guyana’s oil-and-gas extraction for accelerating climate change.

As host of the adversarial show that has been on air for nearly 25 years, Sackur often relies on producers to brief him and work out a list of questions. It appears that his producers paid more attention to a coterie of disgruntled APNU+AFC members whose incompetence handed ‘Exxon’ the ‘kit and caboodle’ when they negotiated the contract in the first place. Sackur’s producers also appear to have relied heavily on a number of NGOs operating in Guyana who are advocating environmental protection policies so strident they would have dairy farmers cull their herds to cut down on methane emission.

When you are as presumptuous a journalist as Sackur is, it’s easy to assume that the President of a small State in the Global South might be just another country bumpkin. Sackur was in for a rude awakening if that’s what he thought.

When he poked Guyana’s jaguar, he got a well-deserved slap down. The fact is that Guyanese are not about to lose their collective minds, and there is absolutely no evidence to suggest they are about to slash and burn every inch of their precious rainforest because of oil and gas.

While the Hardtalk episode garnered over 320,000 views on YouTube (the show is not available Online to viewers outside the UK) and nearly 3,000 overwhelmingly positive comments, President Ali and his administration can’t afford to be distracted.

The President is the Chair of CARICOM, and Guyana has a seat on the U.N. Security Council for the next two years, which means the PPP has a golden opportunity to advance multilateralism as the surest way to tackle challenges such as climate change, territorial disputes, a violent meltdown in Haiti, malnutrition and genocide in Gaza, and gloom in the Ukraine.

President Ali has the demonstrated experience to lead. He has personally engaged with nearly 100 world leaders since taking office. From India to China, shuttling from Qatar to the United Kingdom and the United States, Guyana’s President is helping to bring nations together to address common challenges, and achieve shared goals; core principles of multilateralism.

In the last month alone, and on separate occasions, the President hosted the former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former US President Bill Clinton, and William Burns, head of the C.I.A. and even a delegation from France.

The latter meeting resulted in an announcement by France’s Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs Stéphane Séjourné to open an embassy in Guyana by 2025. And at last November’s COP28 in Dubai, President Ali met Mohammed Bin Zayed, President of the U.A.E., and the latter promised to visit Guyana sometime this year, and possibly open an embassy in Georgetown.

This all bodes well for the people of Guyana and President Ali, and his administration should be applauded for being steady hands on deck in turbulent times.

Yours respectfully,
Nazim Baksh