IN response to a caller last Monday evening on the Freddie Kissoon Show, I made the point that the genius of Brian Lara was not instantly put on display. No one knew Lara was a genius batsman. He was an obscure name in the West Indies cricket team, where he sat out an entire series as 12th man.
Irfaan Ali did not soar to the skies when he was Minister of Housing. He was one of 20 ministers and he served under a president and a prime minister. You can compare Lara’s status as 12th man to Ali’s ministerial status. When Lara was picked as part of the playing eleven, the brilliance manifested itself.
When Ali became president, the uniqueness manifested itself. I have written what I will now pen again; I don’t think Guyana knew him, so when he became president, Guyana just saw him as another president. But like Lara, the opportunity came. The CARICOM nations will always remember Brian Lara. The name Lara will never be divorced from the CARICOM nations.
And so will be Ali. What Lara is to West Indian cricket, Ali will be to CARICOM political leadership. It has been five years of the exercise of power by this unusual and unique Caribbean politician, and in those five years, Ali has laid the foundation for a legacy that will put him above the two big names in Guyanese history that will never go away – Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham.
I have no doubt that he will be re-elected in September, and when he rides away in 2030, there will be Irfaan Ali at the top of the list whenever CARICOM nations discuss the great Caribbean leaders. Well, Guyanese people do not need a political analyst to describe to them the nature of Irfaan Ali. His style, substance, persona, inner character, humanity, modesty, and most of all, his reach, have been on display for five years.
Ali came out of nowhere and took Guyana by storm and catapulted himself onto the CARICOM stage. With Mia Mottley, they are seen as the definitive leaders of the CARICOM nation. In Guyana, he is seen as the definitive politician.
Ali is different from what we have seen in the post-Independence West Indies. Ali humanises the exercise of state power. Ali uses state power to show his fellow Guyanese that power and presidential office do not have to appear distant from the people. He takes the Office of the President to the people of Guyana.
But taking the presidency to the people does not mean that it is a superb achievement. It can only be a phenomenal feat if, when you go and you meet the nation’s citizens, you deliver. And when he seeks out the people of Guyana and talks to them and listens to them, he delivers. I don’t think Ali has extinguished the bush fires he confronted over the past five years, and has not delivered to the people whose livelihoods the bush fires threatened.
I don’t think Ali has visited any African district, met with any African organisation and made promises that did not materialise. This is his impressive track record. You can be cynical and say that he has the resources to give the Guyanese people that he has made promises to; he has oil money. But that is just cynicism and not objective analysis.
A country can have stupendous resources, and its leader does not share the wealth. The story of Europe and the United States is all about not delivering. Those are unimaginably rich countries. But according to perhaps the world’s most brilliant economist, Thomas Piketty, the past 60 years have seen a continuing visibility of the widening gap between the rich and the working people in those countries.
If Guyana has oil money, how can you be cynical when a leader shares the oil wealth? A man named Terrence Campbell, who aspired two months ago to lead the opposition into the 2025 national election as presidential candidate, accused President Ali of the “diabolical use of resources” when the President goes to African communities and shares Guyana’s resources.
And since we are on the subject of African Guyanese, here are the realms of sociology, culture, politics and economics in which Dr. Mohamed Irfaan Ali will eclipse Jagan and Burnham. I believe that at the end of his tenure in 2030, Ali would have achieved a colossal reduction in ethnic suspicion and would have been largely responsible for a widening space for racial equality, which eluded both Jagan and Burnham. As the President takes to the podium this afternoon, he should remember these words of Shakespeare
“But be not afraid of greatness
Some men are born great
Some achieve greatness
Some have greatness thrust upon them”
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.