Editorial

Hardly anyone would welcome the turn of global events at year’s end as having shown substantial improvement over the last twelve months.

In the few remaining days left before we celebrate Christmas, the likelihood that criminal activity could intensify will be one of the things uppermost in the minds of Guyanese.

So far, around $133m has been spent on the audits which were ordered by the APNU+AFC government on its accession to office in May of controversial agencies and projects such as NICIL, the Marriott Hotel and the Guyana Gold Board.

There are not many ways for a small country to project itself in a world of something like 195 independent states, especially when, in addition, the economic and military heavyweights have commandeered so much of the public space.

Before the Apollo 8 mission captured Earth’s first self-portrait in December 1968, there was little sense of our collective fragility and interdependence.

As reported yesterday, the United Nations International Court of Justice (ICJ), in The Hague, on Wednesday, ruled on a border dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.

News that an inspection done on Tuesday morning showed signs of cleanliness at the Hadfield Street Drop-in Centre was indeed welcome.

As has been widely reported, on last Wednesday, December 9, the electorate in St Vincent & the Grenadines made the identical choice to that which they made five years ago, and indeed since 2001, as they returned Dr Ralph Gonsalves and his Unity Labour Party (ULP) to office with eight of the fifteen electoral seats in the House of Assembly.

The issue of a more efficient, more effective public service is unquestionably one of the more frequently debated subjects in Guyana today.

It is supremely ironic that at the very moment revelations from the audit report of NICIL have pointed to the flouting of procurement rules and the absence of competitive bidding under the previous PPP/C administration that the new government is now facing the same charges as it relates to its murky MoU with Fedders Lloyd for the specialty hospital.

After six months in office there is one thing the new administration should have discovered by now, namely, that government is not easy.

Politics is meant to be an art of contrasts. In an ideal world, candidates who advance extraordinary claims or adopt extreme positions should either be compelled to provide arguments and evidence that justify their stances, or exit the race gracefully.

Rugby fans – admittedly a minority in Guyana – will be familiar with the Maori haka, made famous by New Zealand’s legendary All Blacks rugby team.

Worldwide, 2015 has not been a good year for human rights.

The parliamentary elections in Venezuela on Sunday confirm widely predicted expectations that President Nicolás Maduro’s United Socialist Party of Venezuela has been, for some time, under intense public pressure to the extent that a substantial section of the Venezuelan public have virtually given up on his regime.

News that a serving member of the Guyana Police Force (GPF) is allegedly one of two suspects who confessed to the carjacking and robbing of a taxi driver just over a week ago at Bachelor’s Adventure on the East Coast Demerara really ought to fill us all with a sense of shock, even utter disbelief.

In the December 2nd edition of Stabroek News there was a report about a resident of Lusignan complaining bitterly about suffering from her neighbour’s daily burning of wood and garbage.

Venezuela goes to the polls today. These elections are not for the presidency, but for deputies in the National Assembly, which from the time Hugo Chávez came into office, has operated like a rubber stamp for Miraflores.

Before media coverage of the San Bernardino shootings turned into a post-mortem of an alleged terrorist attack, they seemed depressingly familiar to US television viewers — “just another day in the United States of America” in the words of one BBC newsman.

Wednesday’s editorial (The choice of Commonwealth Secretary-General) provided a rather good explanation and some useful insights into the machinations behind the campaign for the top job in the Commonwealth and the eventual election of Dominica’s nominee, Baroness Patricia Scotland of Asthal (a village in the county of Oxfordshire in the United Kingdom), at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Malta.