Editorials – Page 2 – Guyana Times International

On being hyphenated Guyanese

February 7, 2020February 7, 2020 TIMES INT'L

(“I trot out this article every five years or so.”) One of the most poignant and persistent cries heard around Guyana – especially around elections time – is, “Why do we have to hear about Africans and Indians or Amerindians? Why can’t we all just be Guyanese?” The poignancy is a bit ironic, however, because those same Guyanese, by and large, have been going into the voting booths and voting along ethnic lines for the past fifty years and more. And creating the problem they implicitly bemoan: divisiveness and lack…

The memory war

January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 TIMES INT'L

Observing the rhetoric deployed in the blogosphere, social media, and the letter pages of the newspapers, I have been struck by the ubiquitous invocation of the trope of “400 Black youths killed during the PPP years” to argue that no matter how badly the PNC-led coalition performed during the last five years, they should be returned to office. In an effort to examine this claim factually, the Stabroek News went back to its archives and laboriously listed the 420 persons murdered between Feb 23, 2002, and Sept 2006. They found…

The threat of elections violence

January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 TIMES INT'L

Unfortunately, for Guyana, our politics is not your ordinary garden variety type, where politicians pitch their plans for the development of the country to an open-minded electorate which make their voting decision based on an assessment of these plans and the parties’ capabilities for executing the same, based on their histories. In Guyana, the genie of ethnically directed political violence was let out of the bottle as far back as February 16, 1962, by the PNC and other forces and has never been put back since. On that fateful day,…

Executive’s subversion of our “constitutionalism”

January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 TIMES INT'L

One of the most glaring failures of the PNC-led APNU/AFC coalition government has been its undermining and weakening the institutions of the State – including several that it launched since 2015. In almost every field of human endeavour, it is recognised that we need “rules of the game” for us to function socially and this is where institutions come in. They are, as a matter of fact, the embodiment of such rules around particular values we seek to guide our lives. Most persons conflate the “organisation” with the “institution”, but…

A campaign of desperation

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020 TIMES INT'L

One expectation of election campaigns is for contesting parties to tell the electorate of their plans for the development of the country and its people. This is an important aspect since voters want to hear what the parties plan to do. This allows them choices when casting a ballot. By not being made aware of plans during the campaign, voters are left deprived of the opportunity to be informed on what could be in store for them if that party were to win. In other words, the absence of plans…

The seeds of competition

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020 TIMES INT'L

In Guyana, the question of an equitable distribution of economic goods has always loomed large. And history offers valuable perspectives on this condition; perspectives that should assist us in moving away from the finger-pointing stage (interspersed with gun-toting episodes) that we seem to be mired. The concern over economic distribution should not be surprising in light of our origin as a colony founded on slave and indentured labour. As a non-settler European colony, the Guyanese economy was structured to produce primary products in agriculture and mining at the cheapest possible…

Poverty and sugar

January 24, 2020January 24, 2020 TIMES INT'L

In Guyana, far too many of our people are considered poor and are still waiting to access the opportunities that would allow them to lift themselves out of poverty. In his early months in Government, President David Granger had said that Guyana has enough resources to banish poverty forever. However, after almost five years in power, the nation did not see many real programmes implemented to address poverty and to create “the good life for all” that was promised on the campaign trail during the May 2015 polls. In fact,…

Defying the tenets of democracy

January 17, 2020January 17, 2020 TIMES INT'L

During the APNU/AFC’s official 2020 elections campaign launch at D’Urban Park on January 3, President David Granger is reported as saying that if the coalition were to win the upcoming March 2 polls, his Government will target constitutional provisions for a No-Confidence Motion (NCM). The State newspaper quoted him as saying, “We are going to reform the Constitution so that the nonsense they tried with us over the last 12 months does not happen again.” The “they” referred to the Opposition People’s Progressive Party (PPP). Given what was reported, it…

A “centre force”

January 17, 2020January 17, 2020 TIMES INT'L

Now that Nomination Day has come and gone, after all the buzz about the need for a “third force” to deny both the PPP and PNC a majority and use their strategic few seats like jujitsu in the National Assembly to steer development in a non-partisan direction, the opportunity was allowed to slip away. There will now be eleven small parties to contest the elections of March 2 against the PPP/C and APNU/AFC. Frankly, I was not surprised at this outcome. Early in 2005, we had written: “ROAR believes it…

Candid…

January 17, 2020January 17, 2020 TIMES INT'L

…race talk One of the challenges we have in Guyanese politics is that while everybody knows voting is driven by “race”, there’s still a significant number of folks who don’t think we should talk about it in the public sphere. Your Eyewitness would give these presumably well-minded people the benefit of the doubt that they’re not just sticking their heads in their posterior aperture. They seem to believe if you talk about race, it’ll “inflame” passions and matters may get out of hand – especially during the combustible elections period.…