Category: Eyewitness

…not so softly The Stabroek News did yeoman service to the nation in publishing a list of 420 persons murdered as a result of the “troubles” after the Mash Day Jailbreak of Feb 23, 2002 and after Sept 2006. According to their analysis, which came out of their records, 151 of those persons had been murdered by bandits; 239 were killed during confrontations with Police and in unexplained circumstances, while 30 were security officers who lost their lives. These figures obviously didn’t include the garden variety murders which hover around…

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…by the people Evo Morales has been ousted as Bolivia’s President and has fled to Mexico where he’s been given asylum. An ignominious ending for a regime that moved its country from being the sick man of South America to its fastest-growing economy for the last decade. One where 1 million persons were lifted out of poverty since 2005 when Morales took over and cut the poverty rate – admittedly still high – by 25%. A regime which was the first to be run by Indigenous peoples and directed developmental…

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…PNC’s business Trade unions were formed to agitate for workers’ rights at the turn of the century in Europe, responding to the socialist “exploitation” critique of capitalism – especially by Karl Marx. They were a safety valve to stave off the explosion – such as what had taken place in Russia in 1917. Our first trade union was formed just 2 years later by Critchlow and by and large, slowly achieved incremental improvements for their charges. Since 1979, however, there’s been a kickback by free-market-oriented governments— led by Reagan in…

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…small businesses Even without oil in sight, Chinese were starting to enter the supermarket business in Guyana. Early on, your Eyewitness had raised red flags about the phenomenon: he’d been in Suriname and seen that within a decade of their entry into that trade there, they’d displaced locals, and were running 90% of supermarkets by 2015!! There hasn’t been a survey done in Guyana on the control of supermarkets by Chinese immigrants, but from his (wide) travels across his homeland – including the interior, he’s willing to hazard a guess…

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…on Granger’s dictatorial bent In five years, we can count the number of times Granger has faced the independent media corps on one hand – which only has five fingers!! But we can now understand his reluctance after the revelations that emerge even when he consents to packaged, pre-arranged soft-ball interviews. Just listen to how he responded to one deferentially posed question as to how he views his DPI’s yanking of ads from the SN over the past few months. The DPI had “explained” its action was precipitated by the…

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…Charrandas There’s the old saying “give a dog a bad name and then hang him”. It acknowledges that when you stain someone’s character, it then becomes easier to take him down for the bigger fall. We were just informed by the Top Cop that the Government of Guyana’s hiring an “international investigator” to dig into the PNC and AFC’s insistence that Charrandas was bribed to vote with the Opposition PPP on their No-Confidence Motion (NCM). A week following the PNC’s slap-down of Moses Nagamootoo’s acceptance in Parliament that the Government…

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…hyphenated identities As happens like clockwork around every election, someone or other will throw into the boiling pot of our politics that cleaves around ethnic identities. “Oh why can’t we all be just GUYANESE, why do we have to be hyphenated-Guyanese??” And of course, then sanctimoniously announce THEY’ve been able to do it and why can the rest of us follow in their hallowed footsteps??!! The assumption, of course, is that hyphenation is a bad and backward thing!! Now right away we gotta point out that this hyphenated-Guyanese business isn’t…

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…on handmaidens It must be rough being a handmaiden, but Moses Nagamootoo is handling it with aplomb, if not outright glee. The handmaiden who brought the role to public notice was, of course, Bilhah, who served Rachael, consort of Jacob. When Rachel, jealous of her sister Leah, became frustrated when she couldn’t do her job – which in those days was getting children, especially sons – she said to Jacob: “Here’s my handmaid Bilhah. Go have sex with her. She can bear children on my knees so I can have…

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…with blinders on As we can see, the field appears to be getting rather crowded in the political sweepstakes! “Appears”!! By the time nomination day rolls around, 80% of the newbies will fall by the wayside on account of their inability to garner even the minimum number of signatures (150) in six of our 10 regions to endorse them!! But what’s troubling is that, while promising alternatives to the two big boys on the block, the newbies just insist that whatever the latter do, they can do better! Fight corruption…

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…small parties Your Eyewitness thinks one of the reasons there are all these small parties springing up is ironically because of our very small society of barely ¾ million persons. Here, everybody knows everybody so invariably they know somebody who was a president of Guyana or ran in elections to be president of Guyana. Don’t forget that – as was listed in excruciating detail yesterday- there have been dozens of small parties since independence. Each with a Prime Ministerial or Presidential candidate. The prevailing sentiment clearly is, “if ‘so and…

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