Category: Eyewitness

Power-drunk opposition Burnham had an expression that displayed his cold bloodedness when it came to power. In 1979, asked as to how he planned to deal with the threat from Rodney and the WPA, he replied with a smile: “Comrades, there are many ways to kill a cat. You can cut its throat; you can give it mange; you can drown it; you can strangle it…” His successors have learnt at his feet, well. The opposition, as was articulated by Speaker Trotman when he was in the bosom of the…

Read More

  Bitter spite   Martin Carter wrote that “the mouth is muzzled by the hand that feeds it”. He knew of what he wrote. Burnham had hired him as Information Minister and certainly kept him on a tight leash. He finally quit in disgust. The opposition is obviously following faithfully in Burnham’s footsteps now that they have gotten control of the public purse. They slashed Gy$ 20 billion from the budget – but what was most vindictive and spiteful were the chops to the budget of the OP to the…

Read More

Spurning peace   We return to the offer of the government for the tripartite talks with the president to resume. A few days ago, we railed against the opposition for not even having the courtesy to respond to the government’s invitation. But today we got a clue of what’s going on behind the scene – from the Muckraker-in-Chief who sits in the councils of both AFC and APNU. Calling Gail Teixeira, who issued the invitation on behalf of the government, a “Stalinist”, Kissoon dubbed his opposition colleagues ‘stupid’ if they…

Read More

Insubordination   The David Ramnarine flap is not as inconsequential as some may think. In a new democracy such as ours, situated as we are in the Third World, and more specifically in the bosom of Latin America, we cannot be oblivious to the need for disciplined forces to accept they are subordinate to the civilian authorities. This is a lesson that the opposition and its cheerleaders in the media seem determined to evade. The lines are drawn very clearly. The civilian authorities must not get involved with direct operational…

Read More

  Revisionists   One of the most sickening features of oppositional practice is their refusal to concede the PPP has done anything positive since they came into office. The PPP reduced the PNC’s debt – which Greenidge called the ‘highest per capita in the world’? Nah! That was just handed to them!!! Never mind that to reach the first ‘decision point’ for 67 per cent reduction in Paris Club Debt, the PPP had to establish a track record of economic reform over three years and continue at this level for…

Read More

The puerility of the opposition was on display for all to see last Thursday in Parliament. Carl ‘Barry’ Greenidge, fighting desperately to raise his profile for his upcoming battle for leadership of the PNC, brought a raft of motions. Now before motions can be placed on the Order Paper of Parliament, they have to be vetted by the Speaker and the clerk to ensure they are in order. They were allowed to pass. Unbiased Speaker? Ha!! Government spokespersons immediately informed all and sundry that the motions were flawed – fatally…

Read More

Professional shakedown   It is a perverted practice of delinquents to just ‘throw a brick’ in the dark just to see who will be hit. They cackle at the outraged screams of unwary victims. It’s the same mindless viciousness that typifies the opposition AFC’s attacks on NICIL. But it’s not just the cheap thrill of the cackles they seek – it’s to turn Guyanese against Guyanese by claiming that the government is ‘hiding’ billions of dollars in NICIL while the country is in need. Leading the pack have been Ramjattan…

Read More

Snap elections panic   After overplaying their hand in Parliament with their indiscriminate axing of the budget, the opposition APNU/ AFC are petrified that President Ramotar will call snap elections. They couldn’t have missed the revulsion of the hinterland communities to the inane chops to the LCDS, which at last would have placed Amerindians in the drivers’ seat on national development. They’ve seen the anger in youths when the OLPF and fibre-optic cable programmes – designed to bring them into the twentieth century – were slashed into oblivion. We are…

Read More

  Lost and found?   Amid all the clamour and noise of the budget cuts by the parliamentary dictatorship of APNU/ AFC, we’d wondered what happened to Patrick Yarde. With the opposition wielding its budget axe like berserk Vikings, and the government protesting that public servants would have to be let go it was not unreasonable to expect to hear the measured, drawling cadences of Patrick, was it? Hey! The fella gets a fat salary and plenty of perks from the union dues of public servants to live high off…

Read More

Vitriol We return to the utter ignorance redolent in the utterances of Lincoln the Loud on the president’s comments during the Arrival Day commemorations. One might be tempted to dismiss the extremism of Lewis as the antics of a buffoon – one given to ‘brute force and ignorance. But in Guyana there are grave dangers in turning a blind eye to such provocative vitriol on race relations in Guyana. We can do worse than ask if Lewis – as the putative head of the ‘umbrella’ body of trade unions –…

Read More