…up or down?
Your Eyewitness had reason to check out UG’s 2019 Graduation goings-on. The powers that be were very particular about matters and insisted it was actually a “Convocation” – which he understood to be a formal gathering of clergy or students and other credentialled folks. In this case, UG students were to be credentialled with 1985 degrees, diplomas and certificates and such-like – which were to be “conferred”. Having never been to one of these shindigs before, your Eyewitness’ interest was piqued.
But all it did was to confirm what he’d always figured: UG was just as Third World as the rest of the country. Even as they imitated what they must’ve seen in one movie or another on how the First World does it. That big hall in which the graduates are assembled along with their teachers who’d imparted all that learning over four or five years?? UG had strung together five or six large tents under which were arranged a couple thousand plastic chairs. The stage in front was a ramshackle affair and the dignitaries didn’t look too dignified in their faux medieval get-up. What with them squinting into the sun and fanning their faces with their programmes to ward off the hell-like temperature.
The visitors, including your Eyewitness, were guided into chairs on the periphery and a motley crowd it was who’d eventually gathered. They’d brought enough babies and urchins to not only give him a headache but ensure that he’d just hear snippets of what was said from the stage, even if he’d wanted to. The “big screen” TV in front of his gathering was kaput and all he could see were the backs of the media camera crew. The sweaty gathering had to wait until the PM Nagamootoo arrived – and that took a while since he’d moved out from his home in Liliendaal and gone to “town”. He gathered from the feature speaker – the Acting Chancellor of the Judiciary who decided that 33 wasn’t the majority of 65 – that if there’s “no pain; there’s no gain”. Adversity brings growth and all that.
Your Eyewitness doesn’t know about that: people who put you down produce hate, either for yourself or for those who made you suffer. And adversity is equally likely to cause bitterness, frustration, and distrust – nearly the opposite of personal growth. Just look at what the vindictive politics of the PNC has wrought over the past four years to those who they’ve neglected.
But back to the convocation. There was much boasting and bragging about the “largest” number of graduated coming from the “social sciences”.
Your Eyewitness wondered how they’d fare in the new oil-based “green economy”.
…the bar
There’s one newspaper that has persistently gone after the International Oil Companies (IOCs) for their actions following the contract the Government signed with them in 2015. And no matter what your Eyewitness and others have pointed out, they keep on barking up the wrong tree. When Granger’s Nassau pal Raphael Trotman, Minister renegotiated the PSA, he knew oil had been struck.
The fields had been “de-risked” so he could’ve set his own terms for Guyana since Exxon had just given up on prospects in the Arctic and the Canadian oil sands. Their reserves had fallen to historic lows. Furthermore, the 1999 PSA signed by Janet Jagan had expired and the GoG wasn’t bound to the old terms – signed when no one knew oil was under the Atlantic. Yet Trotman, who was supposed to be working for us Guyanese, gave away the store and yet the said newspaper doesn’t say a word about his treachery!!
Since when we can move the bar and insist that companies don’t have to maximise their shareholders’ value??
What about value for us by the PNC??
…on
The most erudite legal scholar of Guyana – for all times – Chief Justice (rtd) Ian Chang passed away.
No other jurist has even alluded to the “basic structure” doctrine he invoked and which can block the PNC’s constitutional adventurism.