In the months prior to the December 21 confidence vote in the National Assembly two issues, particularly, had taken centre stage on the national agenda. The first, which had surfaced much earlier, had to do with preparations for the advent of oil and gas as a likely economic game-changer for the country. Those discourses, at the levels of both officialdom and across the country, as a whole, had to do mostly with the extent to which Guyana was on the way to creating a domestic infrastructure, including an adequate legislative framework and an institutional arrangement to adequately manage an “oil and gas economy.”
The second issue arose out of the official disclosure that President David Granger had been diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin lymphoma, a form of cancer, and that arrangements had been made for him to undergo a protracted period of treatment in the Republic of Cuba that was to last several months.
In the period that followed, the two issues continued to engage public attention to the exclusion of virtually everything else, save perhaps, (though to a somewhat lesser extent) the unfolding political crisis in Venezuela and the consequential steady movement of refugees across the unprotected border, into Guyana.
