Henry Jeffrey

It is in the very nature of modern, media-centred, politics for secondary issues to become larger than life and overshadow more important agenda items.

Cheddi Jagan was extremely proud of his government’s commitment to transparency and one of the most visible signs of this was his government’s ability to present the annual Auditor General’s Report after many years of default under the PNC regime.

Cross Border Career Stretch in the Teaching Profession (cont’d) Since the idea is not to prevent but rather to facilitate an overseas career for those who wish it and have performed well, government can be more proactive in arranging such recruitment and putting reengagement incentives in place. 

The current quarrel between the government, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the opposition over the content of the first Order Paper (parliamentary agenda) of this new parliamentary year keeps us in the same mode that has developed since the last general elections: a government blustering its way in the hope of finding an opportune moment to call a new election and an opposition determined to close the noose around the government’s neck.

The first of the thirty-two recommendations found in the 2012 Guyana Report on Aging (the Report) states that “Associations of Older Persons could help educate about the rights of the elderly and promote their active participation in the community activities”.

“Even though, the growing ageing population and the concomitant changes this will bring are viewed as a major socio-economic challenge for Guyana, other competing development priorities have overtaken the national agenda.

I began this discourse a few weeks ago by indicating that three programmes targeted at the elderly by the Barbados government have been identified as regional best practices.

Aging, along with and its moral and practical implications is so visible that most societies have had to establish norms to deal with it, but as Thomas R Cole, et al, observed in The Meaning of Aging and the Future of Social Security, “the ancient and medieval understandings of aging as a mysterious part of the eternal order of things gradually gave way to the secular, scientific, and individualist tendencies of modernity.

This intervention was motivated primarily by a report in the Stabroek News that from ten Caribbean programmes which were highlighted as “best practices” for the provision of services to the elderly by the Third Regional Intergovernmental Conference on Ageing in Latin America and the Caribbean, which took place recently in Costa Rica, Barbados was recognised for three of its programmes: the Home Care Programme, Nursing Pilot Project and its Information Communication Technology Programme.

The Region 10 chairman and his team should be congratulated for successfully completing the recent negotiations with the government.

The PPP likes to tell the story of how Arthur Schlesinger Jr.,

In 1989, after some twenty-five years in office, the PNC lost its strategic advantage over the PPP, and arguably left Guyana a more divided society than it was when it came to office in 1964.

Even allowing that the unconscionable shooting and killing of protesters at Linden may have complicated matters for the government, how is it possible for a ruling party to concede so much on the major issues brought to the table by the other side but yet achieve so little?

“The President’s pension and the Prime Minister’s pension shall be seven-eighths of the highest annual rate of salary paid to such persons at any time as President or Prime Minister as the case may be or two hundred and four thousand dollars per annum, whichever is the greater,” says the 1991 amendment to the Pensions (President, Parliamentary and Special Officials) Act Chapter 27:03, which now appears extremely dated.

In his defence to demands by the opposition that he should resign over the police action at Linden that killed three innocent protestors, the Minister of Home Affairs, Mr.

It is generally believed that the presidency of Mr. Bharrat Jagdeo constituted one of the most autocratic periods in the post-independence political history of Guyana in spite of the fact that he did not have control of both the government and the PPP the way Cheddi and Janet Jagan did.

The question I want to consider here is what can be done to improve internal democracy in the political parties in Guyana?

My last three articles focused on the need to radically reform the undemocratic/illiberal nature of the PPP, rooted as it is in old and misunderstood autocratic doctrines such as democratic centralism and vanguard party. 

Notwithstanding the present stagnation in the area of political reform, I believe that our political parties are on the cusp of major restructuring and that John Maynard Keynes was perhaps correct when he claimed that: “The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood”, for even today, notions like “democratic centralism” and “party paramountcy,” rooted as they were in autocratic political cultures that are either dead or in their death throes, are still being used to explain contemporary issues.

In my previous article I pointed out that one of the reasons given by former Speaker of the National Assembly, Mr.