Editorial

Next month will complete 25 years since nearly 50,000 women from all around the world and all walks of life met in Beijing, China and managed over the course of two weeks to bring into being what was at the time the most enlightened proposal for changing the lives of women and advancing their rights.

The collective yawn and its accompanying synchronized sigh occurring across the Caribbean last Sunday morning whilst West Indies cricket fans perused their Sunday newspapers was not in response to a review of the recent tour of England, but rather to the announcement that Cricket West Indies (CWI) was now in receipt of the Wehby Report.

What had been, up until a few weeks ago, a fairly animated public discourse regarding the likelihood of a restart of the state-run classroom education system now appears to have undergone a lowering of its decibel level.

As inauguration addresses go, President Ali’s own on Saturday hit the key notes.

On Thursday President Irfaan Ali said that his new ministers were expected to be results oriented, efficient and transparent, and that they would be held accountable. 

In late July, four men who control companies worth nearly 5 trillion dollars told a congressional hearing that their businesses were not monopolies.

Former President of Suriname Desi Bouterse commented recently that unlike Guyana, Suriname did not have a ‘winner-take-all’ political system. 

In August 2018, a 15-year-old Stockholm schoolgirl began a protest in front of the Swedish parliament building, vowing to continue until her government met the carbon emissions target agreed by world leaders in Paris, in 2015.

As the West Indies cricket team wing their way back home to the Caribbean, no doubt they are a saddened but wiser bunch, with their luggage slightly lighter, albeit for having lost the Wisden Trophy.

We are, at this juncture, nowhere close to a ‘serum’ that will banish the spectre of coronavirus from our midst.

On June 11, 1963, at the height of civil rights unrest in the United States not unlike what it is experiencing today, then President John F Kennedy uttered the following words in an announcement calling for nationwide participation in addressing what he described as the moral crisis: “In a time of domestic crisis, men of goodwill and generosity should be able to unite regardless of party or politics.”

Politics is sometimes described as the art of the possible.  Not in Guyana.

Representative John Lewis of Georgia, an icon of the American Civil Rights movement, received a fitting send-off this week despite the political and economic upheaval in the United States.

Former Barbadian Prime Minister Owen Arthur who died on Monday has been commemorated in tributes from all over the region. 

On Sunday last, this newspaper’s “Women’s Chronicles” column saw women addressing their disappointment at the hoops they were being made to jump through to visit non-Covid-19 patients at the Georgetown Public Hospital.

In a recent interview with Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace, American President Donald Trump hinted that he might not accept a loss in the upcoming November elections as he will claim that it was rigged.

Global discourse on the subject of food security has been accentuated by the advent of COVID-19 and what the world’s foremost international organizations say are the possible implications of the effects of the virus for both hunger and malnutrition across the world in the future.

As APNU+AFC and its surrogates continue to defy the will of the people by first sponsoring naked electoral fraud and when that failed occupying all tiers of the judiciary with spurious and vacuous legal challenges to the declaration of the result of the March 2nd elections, it is evident that Guyana faces its greatest threat to democratic governance since the massively rigged elections of 1985, courtesy of the then PNC which today again features in treachery of the same order.

The de facto government has hardly demonstrated its competence in managing the Covid-19 pandemic. 

The ongoing crackdown in Portland, Oregon – enforced by unidentified federal agents in camouflage and tactical gear – has produced scenes more reminiscent of democratic resistance in a banana republic rather than a protest in an American city.