Future Notes

What a cost when, in a most gruesome manner, seventeen individuals lost their lives as a result of having been taken into custody by a society that promised to safeguard all their other freedoms apart from their right to liberty.

Hours after Walter Rodney was killed and his body taken to the Georgetown Public Hospital, Forbes Burnham spoke to a well-connected young woman who was a family friend and a nurse at the hospital, saying he had heard that Rodney had been killed and wanted her to go find the body and confirm that it was indeed his.

Not long after Walter Rodney met his death in June 1980, I was at Castellani House, the president’s residence on Vlissengen Road, waiting to see Forbes Burnham, when Vice-President Desmond Hoyte entered the room.

What follows is a substantial extract from `When is the next Rodney inquiry?

An admixture of our unique political context and nearly two decades of autocratic PPP/C rule have given rise to notions of how we should conduct political discourse that appear to me neither practical nor complete.

‘Practice without theory is blind. Theory without practice is sterile. Theory becomes a material force as soon as it is absorbed by the masses.

To adequately manage local government, or anything else for that matter, one should have some general philosophical understanding of what local government should be and is and, given existing resources, what can be done to help it towards its goal.

Etched in the public mind about Mark Benschop is his incarceration, for five years, in solitary confinement for treason followed by an unconditional pardon by then President Bharrat Jagdeo.

I’d bet my bottom dollar that a substantial number of those who wanted to see the PPP/C out of government and supported the coalition are now extremely disappointed with the performance of the latter.

Say what you like about Cheddi Jagan and Forbes Burnham, they and thus their governments had holistic and audacious views of Guyana and its development.

Last week I stated that during my presentation to the Public Service Commission of Inquiry I argued that after only a few months in office, the present regime succumbed to ethnic entrepreneurship and began undercutting its stated principles of what a public servant should be.

I have some pretty definite views about the Guyana public service, born of some theoretical understanding of how and what it should be doing in modern times and a quite lengthy sojourn in it.

On the morning of 4th June last year, I was at the Guyana Revenue Authority headquarters on Camp Street to collect my driver’s licence and had an interesting encounter with the now besieged Mr.

Last week, in commenting on the controversy that arose when the government sought to bulldoze three pieces of legislation (the Municipal and District Councils and Local Authorities (Amendment) Bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill and the Anti-Terrorism and Terrorist Related Activities Bill) through the National Assembly at one sitting and the government’s response that the PPP/C’s regime had acted similarly, I concluded by suggesting that the current government and its supporters would do best to reference their behaviour against regional and international best practices rather than past PPP/C behaviour.

A few weeks ago, a furore arose over the regime’s stated intention to push three pieces of legislation (the Municipal and District Councils and Local Authorities (Amendment) Bill, the Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism (Amendment) Bill and the Anti-Terrorism and Terrorist Related Activities Bill) through parliament at one sitting.

After the First World War, armed with a ‘progressive’ fourteen-point plan that called for, among other things, the formation of a ‘general association of nations’, United States President Woodrow Wilson landed in Europe and was able to convince the relevant world that such a body (the forerunner of the United Nations) would be a useful international tool.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21) which concluded last Saturday 12th December in Paris succeeded in delivering a universal framework agreement that concretises the direction of the climate change discourse and more importantly affirms the scope of the problem and the directions in which solutions should be sought.

‘Because what we must learn to do, we learn in the doing: we become a master builder by building and a zither-player by playing the zither.

There will be no legally binding agreement at the Paris Climate Summit that is at present taking place if an agreement on finance that is acceptable to the developing countries cannot be reached.

Notwithstanding the fact that most states are said to be independent and sovereign and the governments of small and weak countries are usually not bashful in laying claims to this status, global political economy suggests a different story.