Editorial

The anguished post-mortems of the US election are a depressing record of how drastically liberal America misread the country’s outrage with the status quo.

Recently, Assistant Commissioner of Police David Ramnarine performed the duties of substantive Commissioner of Police Seelall Persaud who had proceeded on several months leave.

In what was a shock to most of the world and many in America, early yesterday morning Mr Donald J Trump pulled off a stunning victory over Democratic presidential nominee Mrs Hillary Clinton and will be sworn-in as the 45th president of the United States come January.

British Prime Minister Theresa May and her Conservative government seem to have been caught by surprise by the decision of the country’s High Court that the British parliament must give its formal approval to the country’s departure from the European Union (EU).

In the fullness of time the 2016-20 Strategic Plan unveiled by the Ministry of Business recently will, we hope, become the subject of discourse amongst various interest groups, not least business support organizations  including the Private Sector Commission and the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

Oftentimes, the failures of the police force tend to be seen mainly in egregious lapses in serious crimes such as the inability to contact them via 911, the absence of transport to respond to armed robberies and murders, long delays in getting to crime scenes, reluctance to engage in hot pursuit and poor investigations, follow-up and prosecution.

The Georgetown citizenry dutifully trekked to the polls last March and voted in – or so they thought – a brand new city council.

A generation ago, in his ‘Open Letter to the People of Guyana’, Martin Carter denounced what he described as a “deliberate policy of degrading the people” and he identified a key component: “corruption as a way of life.”

The Guyana Parliament (or National Assembly) is the legislative branch of government in Guyana, separate but complementary to the other two branches of government, namely, the executive and the judiciary.

After years of frustration and terror for some and a US$20,000 consultancy, Guyana’s 911 police emergency service remains problematic.

As reported in this newspaper over the weekend, the increasing turmoil against the government of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has received the attention of other governments of Latin America.

Finance Minister Winston Jordan is of the view that the media often provide a quality of reporting that comes up short of what is necessary to enhance public enlightenment on many issues that fall under his portfolio.

The October 28 edition of Stabroek Business reported on a US$6m investment in  the coconut industry by Canada-based Guyanese Vishnu Ramdeen.

Guyana is a democracy. It might be a flawed democracy, but it is still a democracy for all of that, and not a militarised state.

Earlier this week a court in Hong Kong listened to chilling evidence of how a British securities trader tortured and murdered two Indonesian women in an expensive apartment in the city’s nightlife district two years ago.

One of the campaign promises of the APNU+AFC coalition was centred on the reduction of violent crime if that party came to power.

At a consultation held on Monday last on Guyana’s preparedness for oil extraction, where several pertinent questions were raised, Chris Pateman Jones of the Oil and Gas Sector of consultant firm EY Global outlined what he referred to as the positives and negatives of oil production.

It is probably the case that the anxiety, indeed the sense of foreboding about the future, which dominated Caribbean decision makers when Britain decided to negotiate entry into the then European Community and Common Market, is not as great at this time, when the British leadership has been forced, from within its own ranks, to negotiate an exit from the European Union.

Up until relatively recently media reporting on the gold mining sector had been constrained mostly by the fact that media houses were less than well-informed about the sector.

Nothing exposes the backwardness in this country and its stymied promise more than the never ending eruptions of power problems.