Category: Eyewitness

…Nagamootoo’s larwahs Imagine Nagamootoo giving the PNC the 11% to break out of its historic best — securing 42% of the votes to win the 2015 elections, and just getting a newspaper column (in the Chronic!!) for his efforts. Well, his old comrade, Donald Ramotar, did predict he’d get “larwah”!! And boy, did he ever get larwah; in fact, a whole litany of them! Your Eyewitness doesn’t have space (or time) to go through the (sordid) list. And in any case, he wants to examine Nagamootoo’s column this week. Captioned…

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…a Chatree In the US, one phrase uttered over national TV at a crucial juncture came to signal the essence of what Richard Nixon was all about: “I am not a crook!” He, of course, had impeachment proceedings started against him for lying about his knowledge of the Watergate break-in, and he resigned before he could be thrown out from the office of the President of the USA. He was disgraced. In Guyana, it appears like Education Minister Nicolette Henry will become (in)famous for claiming in the (post-Broomes not-so-hallowed) chamber…

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…for breaking the law? If there was any need for proof that Khemraj Ramjattan has become even less than a “Christmas blow-blow”, there is his threat to “spank” the policeman who disobeyed his charge to care for the new Chinese vehicles. Why should a police rank listen to a man who can’t even comment on the President’s unconstitutional intrusion into appointments to the Police Force, when he (Ramjattan) can’t even make a suggestion on deploying the Crime Chief!? First Ramjattan gushed as to how Blanhum was the best thing since…

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… Soylent Green In 1944, George Orwell wrote about what life would be in the ultimate totalitarian state. He called it “1984”, the year he predicted that state would come into being – in the then “future”. For us Guyanese, of course, who were said to be “politically precocious”, Burnham established his totalitarian Dictatorship by 1974, when he made his (in)famous “Declaration of Sophia”: the PNC was paramount over the state!! Around that same time there was another movie made, “Soylent Green”, also set in the future – that future…

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…by sugar truth Poor dear!! PM Nagamootoo appears to’ve been stung by some comments your humble Eyewitness made on his “slaughter of the lambs” in the sugar industry. He, after all, assured them before the elections that the sugar industry wouldn’t be closed. His government has been trying to wash away the blood of thousands of fired workers — mostly cane cutters — by claiming they’ll lease lands to them to become cash crop farmers! Your Eyewitness merely pointed out that cane cutters aren’t farmers; and you can’t make them…

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…on racism charge Let’s lay some facts on the table before the issue de jour. In 2015, APNU courted the AFC to go into the election on a common slate. By that time, the PNC had absorbed five putative “parties” to form APNU. But none of them, the WPA, NFA, GAP etc, had any significant followings to buttress the PNC. With Nagamootoo coming aboard the AFC in 2011 – and Trotman suddenly stricken with some mysterious physical and spiritual ailments and conceding the leadership to Ramjattan – the party had…

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…in sugar? The Government boasted that sugar workers have nothing to worry about their future, since some 70 companies have submitted bids for the four estates they’re closing down and selling off. Really?? A number of questions come to your Eyewitness’s mind. The first one has to do with the Trinidadian expert the Government brought in to advise them on their “divestment”. It was advice only people in this APNU/AFC government in general, and its Minister of Agriculture in particular, needed to be told. Anyone with even the slightest connection…

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…and cats Robert Burns reminded us that, “The best laid schemes of mice and men / Oft go awry.” And we can see this unfolding so well with the sad but inevitable sidelining of the AFC by the PNC. Ahhh…the AFC had it all planned out, didn’t they? They’d been launched, back in 2005, to exploit the “floating votes” they insisted existed in even Guyana’s ethnically polarised society. These floating votes would come from all of the various ethnic groups in Guyana, and like Jagan more than a half-century before,…

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…the precariat Back in the day when factories were starting to belch out the smoke and soot in Europe and the US that pushed our global temperatures to its present tipping point, Marx gave the workers labouring in those hell-holes a name: the “proletariat”. Now even if you don’t like Marx, that was significant: if you don’t have a name for “something”, you can’t even talk about it and it doesn’t exist, does it? Sure those workers were used and abused and must have complained bitterly. But it was “life”…they…

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…Guyana? Surely, dear reader, you must’ve read one of those “counterfactual” novels…the ones premised on ‘what if” such and such facts were different. Like what would’ve happened if apes had developed intelligence and ruled Earth? Oh…they did that in “Planet of the Apes”!! Well, right here in Guyana, lots of folks are wondering what life might’ve been if Forbes Burnham was still around. Of course, there are some who’ve vowed to take us back to the Burnhamite days to “fulfil” his legacy…but fate’s arranged for us to have our counterfactual…

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