Future Notes

‘Control of the process yields control over outcomes. Skilled negotiators think hard about the impact of process on perceptions of interests and alternatives, on the part of their counterparts and those they represent, and on their own side.

A few weeks before the last local government elections, a longstanding Baronian friend with whom I use to roam the streets of London before he took off to film school and I to university, and whose late mother was born in Beterverwagting (BV), informed me that the family would prepare a plot of land it owns in the village and offer it to the BV/Triumph Neighbourhood Democratic Council (NDC) for use as a small community park.

The chairperson of the People’s National Congress Reform, Ms. Volda Lawrence, has rightly been taken to task  for the statement she delivered to the Region Four District Conference of her party a week or so ago. 

Our perception of presidential power will largely determine not only how we behave towards the individual and how they will act toward us but also how we will act if, perchance, we ever hold that office.

Generally, there is high voter turnout at elections where the results matter.

It is good that Mr. Tacuma Ogunseye, a senior member of the Working People’s Alliance and one of the most thoughtful, unswerving and prolific supporters of shared-governance (SG), who must be counted among those whom Dr.

In his column in Kaieteur News on Sunday, Dr. David Hinds claimed, “The WPA, of which I am a part, is still committed to power-sharing as a political solution to our problems.

Recently, Israel’s constitution (Basic Law) was changed to described the country as ‘the national home of the Jewish people’ and Jerusalem, even the parts claimed by the Palestinians, as the ‘complete and united … capital of Israel.’

Hardly a week passes without someone bemoaning, in one form or another, the plight of the elderly (persons 60 years and over). 

Given its pitiful management of the oil and gas sector, suspicions have also been raised concerning the many memorandums of understanding (MOUs) the government has been signing and particularly about those relating to that sector.

As this column has noted before, it was the dreaded Cardinal Richelieu who claimed, ‘If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.’

Ms. Volda Lawrence, the Minister of Public Health, when speaking to a gathering of overseas Guyanese in the United States last week, stated that Guyana and Caribbean countries should stop complaining about the impact of the brain drain of nurses.

‘Although it has bountiful resources, including gold and diamonds, Guyana is in the throes of one of the worst economic declines in the developing world.

That some very poor and costly decisions in Guyana’s budding oil and gas sector have recently been visited upon Guyanese is now sufficiently established.

Last week I argued that collective bargaining (CB) cannot increase teachers’ pay to the level they require to compensate for the historical and moral deficiencies they believe they have sustained and are still sustaining, and concluded that a good result for the teachers  can only be won where there exists ‘strong industrial action to induce in the government the political will to positively respond either before its final stage or during that stage by liberalizing the restrictive conditionalities of the arbitration terms of reference.’

For some time I have suspected that collective bargaining (CB) cannot result in an increase in public servants’ wages to the level they require to compensate for the historical and moral deficiencies they believe they are sustaining.

Historically, never mind the lip service paid to it, local democratic elections have been a rarity in Guyana: 1959 then 1970, 1994 and finally 2016.

Almost one year ago to the day I said, ‘I believe that every citizen in Guyana should have direct access to a proportion of the revenues flowing from our oil and gas resources.

Because it has so visibly betrayed the agenda of most of the people who have supported it from the inception, predicting the disaster that will befall the Alliance for Change (AFC) at the local government elections (LGE) scheduled for later this year has become something of a national pastime.

Speaking last week to various emancipation gatherings, President David Granger sought to strike a note of optimism about the impending oil bonanza, but this backfired when he admonished his largely African audiences for spending too much time and money on liming and drinking rather than educating themselves to take advantage of the forthcoming opportunities.