Editorial

During the course of last week, Cricket West Indies (CWI) President Ricky Skerritt must have felt that the annual hurricane winds and accompanying rains had arrived two weeks ahead of schedule.

With no warning whatsoever, we find ourselves confronted with what has been described as “one of the greatest threats in our lifetime to global education, a gigantic educational crisis.”

It seems that the agents of APNU+AFC at the national recount of votes – a number of de facto ministers among them – have taken the opportunity of entering the manufacturing sector and not in a good way.

The Guyanese population had almost lost its sense of the absurd after the egregious events of the last two-and-a-half months, but our headlines last Monday demonstrated that there were still things which could leave mouths agape.

In September 2001, two days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson explained why God had allowed such an outrage in America.

“I have never seen a more transparent effort to alter the results of an election,” Bruce Golding, Head of the OAS observer mission to the March 2 election told the OAS Permanent Council the day before yesterday.

It is now approximately 136 days since the first official public report was issued to the world about a novel coronavirus that was causing debilitating illness and death.

As life continues to unfold here in Guyana, a discombobulating feeling of blurred timelines appears to be encompassing our daily lives.

Long before we can even begin to determine the extent of the likely overall toll of the coronavirus – in terms of deaths, possible longer-term illnesses, social and economic dislocation, changes in our socio-cultural behaviour,  how long the malady will remain with us and the longer term  adjustments we might have to make in terms of the way in which we live our lives – we are going to have to – both as a global community and as individual societies – find short-term responses to some of the immediate challenges that are already here with us.

At the end of day five of the national recount of votes from the March 2nd General and Regional Elections, 207 of 2,339 ballot boxes had been recounted.

To describe the pace of the recount as slothful would be the understatement of the year.

The last six weeks have cost 33 million Americans their jobs –  up from 22 million just a fortnight ago.

In an address to the nation on Monday President David Granger was formal in demeanour and unctuous of tone as he welcomed the announcement of a date for the start of the recount, and called on Guyanese to be patient.

For all of the incredulous things that have been happening recently, we could all be characters on a giant movie set.

Cricket, or to be more specific, the Caribbean Premier League (CPL), was once again stealing the headlines last week, without a ball being bowled.

There are communities all across coastal Guyana whose ‘beating hearts’ are carefully concealed from the outside   except outsiders are welcomed in.

On May 1st, de facto Minister of Public Health, Volda Lawrence expressed exasperation at the rise in the number of COVID-19 cases and the threat that this posed to the general population.

On Thursday a fireworks explosion at the GDF base in Timehri killed three soldiers and injured two others.

As Covid-19 exposes structural flaws in leading democracies and terrifying vulnerabilities elsewhere, it has highlighted a group, comprising hundreds of millions of people, of what might be called an international ‘precariat.’

There has never been a May 1 like this one.  It is true that the celebration of the workers’ day in recent times has not been what it once was, but it still retained a certain symbolic significance.