President Ali – standing tall above the din!

By Earl Bousquet
GUYANA’S President, Dr Irfaan Ali, though not yet three months into his second term, is wasting no time delivering continued good news about economic recovery and futuristic projections for the republic, as promised in campaigning ahead of the September 1, 2025 elections by the ruling People’s Progressive Party (PPP) and its CIVIC alliance partners’ campaign.
On elections day (September 1), the PPP/C had not only secured a safe second term, but the traditional, major opposition party, the People’s National Congress Reform (PNCR) and its APNU alliance, had been routed at the polls by the upstart We Invest in Nationhood (WIN) party.
Parliament has remained unsettled since then.
Since the first designation of the Caribbean region as a Zone of Peace at a regional pre-CARICOM conference in Chaguaramas in Trinidad & Tobago in 1972, regional peace in Caribbean and Latin American waters has been violated by the US-led invasion of Grenada in 1983 and the armed overthrow of the Panama government in 1989.
Guyana has always resisted war with Venezuela over Caracas’ claims to two-thirds or three-fifths of its territory based on historical circumstances dating back to 1899, when the USA, Britain and European nations drew the colonial maps dividing among themselves the indigenous lands stolen by Europe after Columbus’ accidental arrival in 1492.
But while absorbing opposition criticism, the Executive President and Commander-in-Chief has also had to remain utterly focused on the likely possibilities – and consequences — of all types of domestic defensive military engagements arising from the biggest military build-up in Caribbean waters in the 21st century.
Guyana and Venezuela sit — as neighbours — on the world’s largest energy reserves in the shared Guiana Shield, and Guyana is now classified as the world’s third-biggest oil producer per head of population, and Venezuela is sitting on the world’s largest certified crude oil reserves (more than Saudi Arabia).
But instead of being allowed to find ways to share their wealth and work together to better serve their nations and people, the Big Oil partners operating in Guyana and Venezuela are sharing their wider long-term plans for unending monopoly of the respective nations’ energy reserves.
The Western oil majors from Europe and North America have studiously manoeuvred themselves into access and ownership of developing oil-and-gas opportunities in Trinidad & Tobago, Suriname, and French Guiana, also with eyes on Brazil and Colombia’s energy reserves (including in the Amazon region).
While joining the rest of the developing world at the COP-30 meeting in Belem to press for more equitable approaches to addressing the effects of climate change on developing nations, Guyana has now also led the way in calling for a new South-South energy alliance between developing nations.
And unlike the price-setting Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) that Venezuela belongs to and Guyana has stayed out of, Georgetown is also deciding which countries and companies to invite and invest in CARICOM’s fastest-growing economy.
Guyana wisely decided to sit out the first 10-year agreement with ExxonMobil instead of yielding to activist demands that it be renegotiated.
With half that period over, the investing companies are more open to negotiating better contracts – or face unwanted global competition.
In the decade since oil was discovered in the Essequibo region, Guyana has also had time to better understand the economics of the global energy industry and to develop its own local know-how.
During his first term, President Ali and the PPP/CIVIC administration methodically delivered on its September 1 election promise to be inclusive and generous in sharing the nation’s low-energy earnings with citizens.
President Ali is being wrongfully accused of willing to be a pawn of the US and to make Guyana a base of operations for military incursions against Venezuela.
But it’s because of his understanding of the implications of war for Caribbean citizens that, as CARICOM Chairman in 2024, he presided over the delicate negotiations that avoided plans to deploy US boots on the ground in Haiti.
The US and leading Western nations eventually supported an equally ill-fated multinational security force led by Kenyans and funded by the US, which CARICOM leaders had also warned was unlikely to succeed.
That plan has now also been abandoned—with new plans for the use of US drones instead of landing marines.
Interestingly, the gradual, unhelpful militarisation of the cross-border language in the Guyana-Venezuela disagreement has provided a welcome opportunity for all sides (including other bordering nations) to ramp up their security forces’ capabilities—in the name of defence.
But at a time when the region is most threatened by external military intervention, CARICOM is suffering an extremely unfortunate double jeopardy:
First, its spokesperson on Regional Security matters, Trinidad & Tobago’s Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar, is currently totally out of tune with her colleague heads of government.
Secondly, CARICOM’s current Chairman, Jamaica’s Prime Minister Andrew Holness, is totally consumed by local emergency post-Hurricane Melissa revival efforts.
And even with a CARICOM national as Secretary General of the Organization of American States (OAS), it’s still unthinkable that the US-led and funded regional agency headquartered in Washington will adopt a common position with the Caribbean region’s leaders on the preservation of the region as a Zone of Peace.
Also under President Ali’s chairmanship, CARICOM identified with the struggle of Palestinians in Gaza and the Occupied West Bank, with some territories recognising an Ambassador of the Palestinian Authority, Belize joining the global case against Israel at the World Court and Dominica offering to house Palestinian refugees, if possible.
But while bearing the blows from critics and political opponents at home, President Ali was able to report, in early November, that Guyana’s extraction in the Essequibo region is now at over 900,000 barrels per day.
Venezuela also reported in early October that its extraction had increased to one million barrels per day – the first time since 2020.
With the two neighbours together producing almost two million barrels per day, the probabilities of co-operation are real, but possibilities are remote without fundamental changes in respective positions in Caracas and Georgetown.