Category: Eyewitness

Forked tongues Normally we don’t have a problem with the caution “different strokes for different folks”. Hey, we’re not all the same and what may be nectar for you might be bitter bile for me. But what we do have a problem with is when the strokes aren’t administered in a consistent manner. Then we have to question the bona fides of the strokers. Take what just went down in Parliament. You remember that the opposition had drawn a line in the sand that declared: “ROHEE SHALL NOT SPEAK IN…

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‘Cri de coeur’ Major General (retired) Joe Singh issued what can only be described as a ‘cri de coeur’ (cry from the heart) in the wake of the brutal attack on the long-serving general secretary of the PNC, Oscar Clarke. As he noted, Clarke “has been my colleague and friend for over four decades.” The 74-year-old Clarke was shot and robbed by four youths in his home in Sophia. In many of the points that Singh made, he seemed to echo an editorial from the Kaieteur News of January 31.…

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Warped measuring sticks In “Through the looking glass”, Alice (of “Wonderland” fame) is having an argument with Humpty Dumpty. “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – that’s all.” And so we have one Lionel Lowe (from Brooklyn, he’d informed us earlier) defining for…

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Free at last? It’s an old truism that the only ways to get a politician’s attention is to either wave some money under his nose or suggest a way for him to get some more votes. Or both. The two attention-grabbers, of course, aren’t unrelated. The more votes the politicians get, the more money they command. In the U.S., lobbyists for assorted ‘interests’ – ranging from ‘big oil’ to ‘gun freaks’ – take care of the money waving. The vote garnering has moved away somewhat from the days of the…

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Freddie Kissoon claimed that back in 2011, Donald Ramotar, who would have been the general secretary of the PPP then, described him as ‘a sick man’. He tried to brush off the description by sarcastically observing that the now president wasn’t from the ‘medical profession’. So if you see a fella throwing his cast-net on the public road; claiming he’s ‘catching fish’, you have to be a doctor to conclude that he’s wacko? In fact that’s the very kind of off-the-wall reasoning that makes people look at Kissoon oddly. Anyway,…

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Felicitations PM Sam Hinds, standing in for the president who was in Chile, felicitated India’s accomplishment on the anniversary of that country achieving republican status on January 26, 1950. In case you’re confused about the Indian goings – the one that occurs annually on August 15, that’s India’s “Independence Day”. This was their “Republic Day”. We’re going to have our “Republic Day” on February 23. Remember? Okay… that’s the day we call, “Mash Day”– but it’s actually the day we became a “republic”. We know most people in Guyana see…

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Best leader? Ah… how quickly do these bromances fade! Only the other day, right after Ralph Ramkarran quit the PPP in a fit of pique, he and Freddie Kissoon were throwing bouquets and kisses at each other. Kissoon complimented Ramkarran for his ‘masterful’ exegesis on corruption (in the PPP, of course) while he gushingly reported as to how “Ralph” waved to him while he (Kissoon) was on the picket lines. Oh… it was just too sweet. So Ramkarran writes a piece daring to assert that the PPP’s been merely reacting…

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Spite and malice One of Karl Marx’s most cited insights was that history often repeats itself: “the first as tragedy, then as farce”. We saw this perfectly illustrated two nights ago in the National Assembly, when the opposition once again succumbed to their vindictiveness, jealousy, and bitchiness towards former President Bharrat Jagdeo. Led by the wizened septuagenarian Carl “Barry” Greenidge, they again girded their loins to truncate Jagdeo’s pension benefits. Ahhh…how low can they get? Well, with snakes, the answer is “pretty low”! But the opposition are so obsessed with…

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Backtracking But it’s not only vomit you might see in Parliament – expect some more nasty motions. All over the floor. But the poor Chief Justice, will have to clean all of these up. Their effect are all the same – misguided. Take the same ‘gag’ motion that the Speaker has referred to the Committee of Privileges.  For now, the Court has ruled that the Speaker has the right to do this. But let’s see what happens if that committee tries to ‘gag’ Rohee. The court will of course throw…

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Schizophrenic The opposition is in a state of complete disarray. We could start with the stinging defeats they suffered at the hands of the Attorney General. For a group that’s jam-packed with lawyers, you’d think they’d do better in legal matters. But this is exactly the area that’s been their Waterloo – with the court’s ruling they were wrong to chop the budget, to stifle constitutional offices, and now to ‘gag’ Rohee. You have to worry about their legal bona-fides. But their problem lies deeper and their gross legal ineptitude…

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