LAST week, President Irfaan Ali delivered two remarkable speeches at the United Nations General Assembly’s Sixth plenary meeting, 79th session in New York City.

His speeches, interviews and engagements were eloquent elaborations of Guyana’s development trajectory which seeks to strike a balance between exploiting oil and gas resources, while adhering to a model of conservation and sustainable forest management. All of this is designed to help the global effort to combat the ravages of climate change.

Both speeches were class acts. GHK Lall and his cohorts among the top brass of APNU+AFC didn’t think so. Lall penned a long, odious piece in Demerara Waves, titled “The president at the UN: where did everybody go?” Although poorly written, Denis Chabrol saw it fit to foist it upon the sparse readers of his online tabloid.

According to Lall, the reason the General Assembly was “three quarters empty” had to do with President Ali’s style of speaking. Well, he also said that no one cared about climate change. Boring, is how he referred to the subject matter that the President spoke on.

President Ali’s speech on September 25 was streamed live on his own Facebook page. That’s where I watched it. At its peak, it showed 73 live viewers. Given the timing of the speech, something he has no control over, that is to be expected. Two days later his page registered 27,000 views. His five-minute speech at the General Assembly a day earlier racked up 16,000 views. Hundreds of people engaged with it, sharing it and leaving mostly positive comments.

Switch from Facebook to YouTube and add another 17,000 people who viewed the speech which lasted 19 minutes. Hundreds of people engaged with the content giving it a thumbs up and leaving a comment. Flip to another DawnNews (Pakistani) YouTube channel and add another 21,000 views and 64 comments.

If GHK Lall and his friends in APNU+AFC are determined to use numbers to make a point about relevance, please allow me to weigh in.

On September 20, 2016 former President David Granger addressed the 71st regular session of the UN General Assembly. Much of his speech focused on that same topic that Lall flippantly dismissed, writing that “no one wants to hear about biodiversity and climate change.”

After eight years on YouTube, Granger’s speech registered a mere 218 views. One person took the time to give it a thumbs up. No one bothered to leave a comment. This would hardly matter except that GHK Lall is an unblemished admirer of Granger; a man he has described as “dedicated to God, country and family.” When his hero stood by for five months and refused to intervene to stop GECOM officials from conspiring to steal the vote in the 2020 elections, Lall apparently lost his moral compass and his voice along with it.

Granger too has a Facebook page. That’s where he posted a link to his 2016 UN speech. Thirty people gave it a thumbs up, five left comments and it got 14 shares.

Here is something for GHK Lall to chew on: go to YouTube and listen to the comments of Peter Thomson, the Fijian President of the 71st General Assembly. As Granger was about to deliver his speech at the podium, there was so much disinterested noise in the hall that Thomson had to demand that people “show respect to members of state, be seated or exit the hall.” The majority exited, not because Granger or his subject matter was irrelevant, but because that’s the way these sessions work.

At the 72nd session of the UN General Assembly, things improved for Granger. After seven years on YouTube, his speech has 2,800 views; 28 people clicked the thumbs up icon. And again, a wide camera angle showed an almost empty hall. Meanwhile, on Granger’s Facebook page, six people registered a like and six shared the now expired link.

According to Guyana’s media, in 2017, Granger met on the sidelines of his UN appearance with the Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland and the Prime Minister of Mauritius, Pravind Kumar Jugnauth. Important individuals, no doubt.

Last week alone, President Ali met with…well, let’s just say, when Lall and his ungrateful friends reap the benefits of those engagements, they ought to thank him and his administration.