Future Notes

Perhaps more than it realizes, under the 12th December 2015 United Nations Paris Agreement on Climate Change which, having been ratified by a sufficient number of states, became international law in November 2016, the government of Guyana has taken many positions and made numerous commitments that in my view have severely limited its policy space in the area of climate governance.

Can someone please explain what is happening to political governance in Guyana?

Detractors aside, there is a large number of APNU+AFC supporters who are genuinely alarmed by its behaviour.

The Christmas season has traditionally been a time when we try to universalize our good fortune by ensuring that those less fortunate than ourselves, and particularly the elderly, are able to partake in the festivities and merriment.

‘The national budget is a document that … authorises the government to raise revenues, incur debts and effect expenditures in order to achieve certain goals ….

On 27th  April 1953, three months before Fidel Castro and his compatriots began their revolution by storming the Moncada Barracks in Santiago on 26th July 1953 the People’s Progressive Party won its first elections and was preparing to take government in Guyana.

‘Equity thus depending, essentially, upon the particular circumstances of each individual case, there can be no established rules and fixed precepts of equity laid down, without destroying its very essence, and reducing it to a positive law.

In 2011 388 of the world’s richest people owned as much wealth as the poorest half of mankind combined: by 2015, Oxfam claimed this wealth was concentrated in the hands of just 62!

When the PPP/C came to government in October 1992, 2,025 government apartments were dotted around the country but largely in urban areas.

The chairperson of the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CHPA), Mr.

In a public lecture, ‘The Despot Accomplice: how the West is aiding and abetting the decline of democracy’ at the London School of Economics a few days ago, Brian Klaas (http://www.lse.ac.uk/),

The social environment created by those striving for political dominance does not allow for an authentic popular expression of national concerns for it cannot accommodate the kind of democratic participatory institutions that are necessary if such policies are to be found and fructify.

‘I don’t care what you teach and how you teach it.

On 6 October 2016, Stabroek News published an article ‘Cabinet deeply perturbed at Grade Six math results’, the content of which, if true, has certainly taken official education reporting to a new low, and this is magnified by the hackneyed solutions to the problem that are proffered.

Since some 95% of the criminal cases in the United States of America are concluded by plea bargaining, as I was considering witness protection programmes in last week’s column, a thought struck me.

The government intends to enact witness protection legislation and has suggested that a discourse take place around this issue so I thought it useful to give an insight into how these schemes operate.

Just after the completion of the 19th Biennial Congress of his People’s National Congress Reform some three weeks ago, the chairperson of that party, Mr.

Last week I spoke of the growing perception, even among the supporters of the APNU+AFC government, that what happened at the last general elections was, as they say on the streets, an exchange not a change of government.

In opposition, APNU and the AFC were vehemently condemnatory of PPP/C corruption, incompetence, undemocratic behaviour, etc.

Understandable though it may be, is it not ironic that precisely at the time President David Granger was telling the 19th Biannual Congress of his People’s National Congress Reform that ‘We need not be divided, we need to build cooperative relationships at all levels of society’, he is set upon a constitutional course to remove ‘Cooperative’ from the Cooperative Republic of Guyana?!