Editorial

In two days we will be singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’ and bidding farewell to 2016, a most remarkable year any way you look at it, and yet a year no one will be sorry to see end.

As a new year dawns, leaders and populations of most countries will be turning their eyes even more sharply towards the United States as a new president assumes office.

As if the year hadn’t already doled out enough man-made woes to visit on the Guyanese citizenry, the heavens decided to open up on Friday and add an element of pluvial misery to the mix.

The manhunt for Anis Amri, which ended in a shootout in Milan, closes another chapter in Europe’s struggle against terrorism, but it also highlights the difficulties of protecting large democracies against resolute combatants like IS.

Guyana has long been a cash-based society, stubbornly resistant to the many advances in the international financial system over the years, and not in the forefront of the countries in the Caribbean in the implementation of ATM machines, debit cards, credit cards, and online payments.

Christmas is mere days away. This week, the city is abuzz with throngs of people, particularly in the main shopping areas, fetching the ubiquitous black shopping bag, rolled-up rugs and vinyl for floors, Christmas trees, et al.

Right after expressions of concern, reflected in one of our editorials last week, about the stances that president-elect Donald Trump will take vis-à-vis the two great non-Western powers, Russia and China, an incident in the South China Sea has pointed further directions in which relations between the US and those powers might well evolve.

This newspaper’s interview last Tuesday with Mr Errol Hanoman, who is serving his second stint as CEO of the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo), dealt with, among other things, the many seemingly intractable problems confronting the local sugar industry and the challenge of extricating ourselves from those problems.

In the more than 18 months since the APNU+AFC government took office it has stumbled from one faux pas to the next, each time baring a little more of its true, inner workings and quite often to the dismay of many in the public.

Thursday was a bad day for democracy in Georgetown. Never mind all the earlier hype about ordinary citizens being represented by individuals as well as political parties, who were to create a new template for democratic expression in their various councils.

One reason why Donald Trump kept the US media spellbound throughout his campaign was his fondness for impromptu remarks.

In 2005, during an Independence Day address to the nation, then President Bharrat Jagdeo touted the modernisation of Guyana as being dependent on “the development of reliable, inexpensive telecommunication services with a sufficient band-width to allow for Information Technology related services to be developed and exported.

The recent case of Selina Ramotar, who almost died as a result of stab wounds she sustained at the hands of the father of her child, with whom she had reportedly severed a relationship, is one that should cause the authorities to question their proclamations of zero tolerance for domestic and gender-based violence.

Having won the general elections of 2008, called eight months ahead of time by the Barbados Labour Party (BLP) then led by Owen Arthur, the Democratic Labour Party (DLP), led then by David Thompson (now deceased) and subsequently, by Prime Minister Freundel Stuart, managed to obtain a mere 16 seats to the BLP’s 14 in the subsequent elections of 2013.

In the same week that Jamaica, was premiering the film ‘I Am Bolt,’ one of what, no doubt, will be, many projects celebrating the magnificent accomplishments of a native son who rose from modest circumstances to become history’s most accomplished track athlete, the National Assembly in Guyana was debating the country’s budgetary allocation for sport in 2017.

With the new revelations about the D’Urban Park project for the independence jubilee celebrations two things stand out starkly.

If Dr George Norton and the government were hoping that the drug bond scandal would quietly dissipate in the ether, then on Thursday they were rudely disabused of that notion. 

South Sudan is heading towards a catastrophe. Its worsening civil unrest, which has been rapidly deteriorating since a coup attempt last December, has effectively ended the 2015 peace deal that stopped a two-year civil war between rival government factions.

As the budget presentations and debates gather steam, the eyes of the public are once more focused inexorably on the antics and elucidations of those who seek to represent us in that most august of houses ‒ the National Assembly.

Given his humanitarian and philanthropic work, one doubts that when Mark Zuckerberg sat down with his college mates and developed the social networking site Facebook that he, or any of them for that matter, would have foreseen that it would be used for base and ad hominem attacks, bullying and the perpetuation of stigma and discrimination against certain groups.