Mr. Glenn Lall has officially announced his candidacy for the 2025 general election. He did not say if his candidacy will be for a parliamentary seat or he will be the presidential candidate. Two things came to my mind when I read about his announcement. Will Peeping Tom (PT) finally give away his identity by campaigning for Lall, and secondly, who is going to vote for Lall?

I have never seen a more sycophantic relationship between two persons as Glen Lall and the person who writes as Peeping Tom. There is only one PT, which explains why on some days there is no column. If you have several writers, why would there be a missing column in some days?
Now that Lall will be a candidate in the next election, will the sycophancy be at Lall’s political disposal? Will PT campaign for Lall in invisible ways (rather than publicly) but nevertheless give his identity away by the simple fact he will be seen by others at some point in the campaign and they may put two and two together?

I am eagerly waiting to see if PT will be secretly around Lall’s campaign.  So who will vote for Lall? I wanted to title this column, “CN Sharma 2.” Mr. Sharma used his television station to gain popularity and believed being known will make people vote for him. In a million years if Sharma had kept contesting elections, he wouldn’t win 100 votes.

What you have is the identical situation with Lall. But Lall has baggage that is heavier than an aircraft carrier which Sharma did not have. No other politician in the history of this country has more questionable traits than Mr. Lall. The only reason I have not done several columns exposing Lall as perhaps one of the most unacceptable persons on Planet Earth is because I am afraid those close to him will egg him on to sue. Mr. Chris Ram is extremely close to Mr. Lall, and he is a lawyer. I don’t know if Mr. Ram will do so, but I am not prepared to take that chance.
As the campaign season gets underway, I will have my say on Lall. I wrote for almost 30 years for the Kaieteur News (KN) so I have an encyclopedia of the wrong things Lall has done to thousands of people.

PNC activist in London, Norman Browne is a silly person. When I broke with KN over Lall’s insistence that there is apartheid in Guyana, Browne interviewed me. I began to elaborate on the things I saw Lall did in those 30 years and how I spoke out, even though I did not stop writing. Instead of listening to me and allowing listeners and viewers to gain more knowledge of the Guyanese society, Brown began interrupting me with accusations that I am now saying those things because I left KN.

Brown was right. I did not go publicly with the terrible things Lall did and you can accuse me of moral opportunism, ethical double standards, character flaws, and open hypocrisy. I will not reject those descriptions because the fundamental moral recourse is to reject association with evil. Mahatma Gandhi

said non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty. I still continued at KN because I wanted to write. I guess I will always be on weak moral ground because I stayed and was part of the problem.
I knew Brown well and expected him to use context, but in that interview, he was in an emotional rage to defend Lall – the same Browne that is an incessant critic of Aubrey Norton. I guess Lall will only get three votes; his own, Brown’s and the man who writes as Peeping Tom. So what kind of votes will Lall get?

The problem with Sharma and Mark Benschop was that they were obsessed with their own self-importance and they translated that to mean that people considered them important. Both Sharma and Benschop did not get even 100 votes. Lall has inculcated the same trait as Sharma and Benschop. It is a psychological flaw as old as the sea. Once people become popular, they think they can unduly influence people and people will accept what they say.

I remember two adumbrations of Barack Obama when he was president, and both outputs were rejected. He went to Kenya and told the then president that gay rights must be prioritised. The Kenyan leader told him that they are more important rights still to be prioritised like the right to drinking water in Kenya. At the height of the Brexit campaign, Obama urged the British to stay in the EU. They did not listen to him. More on the Lall’s candidacy later.

DISCLAIMER: The views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Guyana National Newspapers Limited.