President Irfaan Ali’s tenure as Guyana’s Ninth Executive President began with what was widely felt to be his insufficient experience in ‘frontline’ politics to come even close to being able to hit the ground running, insofar as meeting all of the requirements necessary to allow for the proficient steering of the ship of state. That said, of course, he would not have been the first Head of State to have been thrown in at the deep end.
His selection as the People’s Progressive Party’s presidential candidate in January 2019 had been realized largely on account of the compelling influence of Bharrat Jagdeo, who, by that time, had not only risen to become the unquestioned ‘boss’ of the PPP but had also acquired a considerable measure of leadership experience from his two consecutive terms as the country’s Executive President.
When he had secured the position of General Secretary of the PPP in 2017 Bharrat Jagdeo had leapfrogged many of his ‘seniors,’ his ascendancy seemingly due in large measure to a combination of the sheer force of his personality and what was widely felt to be his sharp political instincts derived from his earlier experience as the country’s President.
Nowhere, arguably, was his influence inside the PPP and his talent for political manoeuvring more profoundly evidenced than in his piloting of the Irfaan Ali presidential candidature through the PPP’s Central Committee, reportedly ‘causing’ two considerably more senior Party members than his own ‘pick’ to stand down from the ‘race’ for the presidential nomination.
When, the PPP/Civic having been declared the winners of the country’s March 2020 general elections, Irfaan Ali was sworn in as the country’s ninth Executive President on August 2, it had been, more or less, unquestionably acknowledged in political and public circles, that it was Bharrat Jagdeo who had ‘put him there.’
Thereafter, the country witnessed a surfeit of public commentary on the subject of whether the new President possessed either the political experience or the ‘presence’ to lead the country. When Jagdeo was named as Irfaan Ali’s only Vice President that, unsurprisingly, set tongues wagging to the effect that what the country was witnessing was a power-behind-the-throne phenomenon, or, as it had been put privately by one commentator, a ‘Jagdeo third term.’
All of those preceding developments resulted in the targeting of President Irfaan Ali for a higher than usual level of public interest in scrutinizing the ‘credentials’ of their new President with proverbial ‘fine teeth combs.’ Setting aside his lack of political experience at anywhere close to the ‘exalted’ level into which he had now been deposited, it will be recalled that a small squall erupted over the veracity of his declared academic qualifications though that failed to survive anything beyond an energetic but limited public flutter. What was felt, in some quarters to be a lack of ‘presence,’ believed to be a qualification for presidential office, became, more or less, a moot point once he had been well and truly installed in office.
For a while, however, President Ali became a ‘victim’ of that quixotic Guyanese tendency to hold their leaders up to a dazzling light of public scrutiny which is rarely, if ever, forgiving of such slippage as may appear to provide evidence of unworthiness. One might add that in our particular political environment, relentless pillorying where ‘cracks’ are detected, usually takes little account of the fact that the target would have been thrown in at the deep end. That had been the case in the instance of the man who had become the country’s ninth Executive President, to a greater extent than his predecessors.
In the instance of President Ali it became a matter of growing into office rather than hitting the ground running. If he may have become aware, in one way or another, of the exalted expectations which Guya-nese have of their leaders, ‘religiously’ living up to those expectations without a shred of previous experience at anything even close to that level, would have been an entirely different matter. This, of course, is not to say that President Ali would not have been particularly sobered and focused by the very thought of letting both his Party and, more importantly, his country, down. That awareness, alone, would almost certainly have imbued Irfaan Ali with an understanding that letting his Party and country down was not an option.
President Ali’s faux pas in the delivery of his address to the Seventy Sixth Session of the United Nations General Assembly, unleashed what has long been a compulsive tendency among Guyanese to heckle gaffes by functionaries holding high political office. Whilst, arguably, his speechwriters and other media handlers must shoulder much of the blame for what turned out to be an embarrassing occurrence, that did little to quell a tirade of local heckling targeting the President, directly, laying bare that unsparing Guyanese disposition for lampooning the perpetrators of such occurrences. Whatever official posture might have been struck following the UN General Assembly gaffe it is hard to tell how long it would have taken the President to put that behind him.
Whether President Ali is allowed to discharge his own expectations – as much as those of the nation – of his presidency may will repose in circumstances, some of which are not altogether within the boundaries of his own control. Whether or not, for example, he owns the prerogative of his office to lead from the front, has become an issue that comes and goes on the local gossip circuit without ever disappearing for too long. It is felt in some quarters that the factor of his powerful Party Leader and Vice President often appears to retard the flowering of his presidency.
One recent example of the extent of Vice President Jagdeo’s unquestionable influence on decision-making in matters of particular importance was the prerogative he was afforded of addressing the recent 25 x 2025 Agri Investment Forum where, in what one media report described as a “feature address,” he (according to the media report) urged the “several Caribbean Leaders” there present to “step up to the plate and drive the ambitious goal to drastically cut down on the importation of food products into the region by 2025.” This mild ‘lecture’ to CARICOM Heads was delivered against the backdrop of his own tenure as ‘Lead’ CARICOM Head of Government in the area of food security which had accomplished little if anything of substance in the terms of the realization of regional food security goals.
Public perception that the presidency was ‘gifted’ to him by Bharrat Jagdeo may not, perhaps, unduly trouble President Ali. After all, he is the President, still possessed of considerable latitude to make a mark of his own. So that when, as we say in Guyana, push comes to shove, the story here is really about Bharrat Jagdeo, about what is believed to be his perception of himself as a ‘maximum leader,’ no less. Not unobtrusively, he appears to have succeeded in creating a kind of first-among-equals understanding within the pecking order, through what is believed to be his strategic interventions into the political process, possessing no clearly defined and publicly declared set of responsibilities but known, for example, to be the administration’s ‘oil and gas man,’ an officially undesignated ‘portfolio,’ but, without question, by far the most important one within the administration.
President Ali, meanwhile, is, it seems, being allowed more elbow room to ‘grow’ into the presidential portfolio through various other regional and international pursuits, not least, those that have to do with the strengthening of relations between Guyana and the Caribbean and Guyana and the wider hemisphere.
On the whole, a circumstance would appear to have evolved in which President Ali’s presidential responsibilities are sufficiently clear cut as to cause the tasks that fall under his portfolio to be fairly well-defined. By contrast, and setting aside his role as the country’s oil and gas Czar, Vice President Jagdeo appears to enjoy something of a ‘free hit,’ to paint with a broad brush as exemplified in his May 20 ‘It Has To Come From The Top’ lecture to Caribbean Heads at the just concluded 25 x 2025 in which one overly patronizing media report on his presentation described the long moth-balled ‘Jagdeo Initiative’ as “the basis of the vision that seeks to reduce the region’s food import bill by 25 per cent by 2025,” something of a descent into wholly misleading ‘idol worship.’
On the international stage, particularly, Irfaan Ali has had, up until now, more than ample opportunity to spread his political wings, to grow, arguably to a greater extent, than at home. That said, Vice President Jagdeo’s primus inter pares image has become unquestionably acknowledged across the domestic political landscape, leaving open the question as to whether Bharrat Jagdeo does not remain the officially unannounced holder of the title of ‘the special one.’
