The announcement just over a week ago that the first phase of President David Granger’s medical treatment in Cuba for Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma has been successfully completed and that his doctors are satisfied with his response to the chemotherapy which he has had to undergo and with his overall physical well-being, is a development that should be welcomed and celebrated by Guyana. It is good news for us as a nation not only because matters to do with the health of the country’s President ought to be an issue of national concern but also because the news about the President provides reason for a measure of nation-wide positivity and thankfulness at a time of a fair measure of rumbustiousness associated with last December’s confidence vote in the National Assembly.
In any civilized nation matters pertaining to the well-being of the President (or whatever alternative title the leader of the nation may bear) ought to be attended by a respectful attentiveness if not a deeper collective mindfulness, as much for the sake of the stability of the country as anything else. That, one hopes, is not too much to ask of our country even in a combative political environment. Truth be told, we would be casting aside something that is ‘second nature’ to our cultural disposition if national thankfulness for the good news about the President were not to transcend the less palatable political instincts that are often extant in our political behaviour. One makes this point mindful of the fact that there are times when the political environment can spawn a mood of the most unpalatable churlishness. Those times sometimes descend upon us without a generous measure of notice.
Without seeking to place oneself in President Granger’s shoes it is difficult to imagine that he would have had, ever, to face a challenge quite resembling this one. The nature of his illness and the demands of a regimen of chemotherapy, on the one hand, and the implications of all of this for his duties to the nation, on the other, would have required the kind of decision-making, which, in its nature, would never before have been asked of a Guyanese Head of Government. The nature as much as the magnitude of the circumstance would have imposed not just the loneliness of personal introspection which President Granger could hardly have avoided, but, as well, occasions of brutally pragmatic discourse with those close to him, be they family or trusted advisors. Some of those would have been extraordinarily emotionally demanding.
And if it may be altogether reasonable to assume that President Granger might have dealt with those encounters with that sense of pragmatism usually associated with men and women of his earlier profession, it would be entirely wrong to strip him of the humanness to which, like us, he is entitled and to assume, therefore, that he would have remained altogether un-phased in the face of the kinds of challenges that are tied to that human frailty. Those intimate ‘huddles’ with loved ones too, would not always have been spared the emotional circumstance of the moment.
That alone would have been a formidable challenge for the President. Add to it the implications of the discourses and the attendant decisions for the nation which he leads and the burden of the responsibility becomes all the clearer.
There were, of course, the events of December 21 in the National Assembly and the tumult that derived therefrom. At one point, during the short interludes in his commuting between here and Havana, time that ought have been used for rest and rejuvenation would have had to be spent providing carefully measured presidential responses.
Precedent leaves little doubt that ours is a nation in which the health and well-being of Presidents has been, customarily, the subject of close scrutiny and never-ending unofficial diagnosis. A presidential ‘off day’ or a missed public engagement, whatever the substantive reason, has been known to give rise to jittery public conjecturing that often wanders into the realm of speculation regarding the Head of State’s health. President Granger has been no exception to that rule.
Other Presidents have required medical interventions while in office though the nature of those experiences provided no opportunity for personal contemplation in the matter of their remaining in office. This is not the case in the instance of President Granger. There is a sense, therefore, in which the opportunity afforded him to make his own call on the continuity of his presidency brought with it a unique and enormous personal challenge. The decisions that he would have had to make have had implications that extend way beyond his personal well-being. They would, as well, have had implications for public judgement regarding the character of the man.
To his considerable credit, too, the President allowed for no protracted interlude into which would have crept potentially destabilizing waves of national conjecture and the inevitable toxic environment that was bound to be spawned. In making the call what was seen in some quarters as a surprisingly early call on the issue of his continuity in office David Granger has, in effect, asked the nation that he leads to trust his judgment. He understands, one assumes, that in the final analysis that will be one of the critical barometers by which both his character and his presidency will ultimately be judged. History, perhaps to a much more poignant extent, will make the final, more deliberate, more contextually appropriate judgment of the man.
