Editorial

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.

One month ago today, a one-hour-old baby born to Akiem Balgobin and Phoulmattie Ramjattan at the Georgetown Public Hospital, fell, reportedly off of a cot, at the hospital while under the care of a nurse or nurses in the hospital’s Maternity Unit.

Since the Caribbean Community is, as we know, not a single state, the tendency towards diplomatic unilateralism on the part of one or other member state is, or has become, a normal expectation.

The outcomes of the recent sorties by teams of officials from the Ministry of Social Protection to workplaces across the country, most recently to the operations of the Bauxite Company of Guyana Inc (BCGI) and to the business community in New Amsterdam, provide revealing glimpses into the extent to which employers are unmindful, even contemptuous of some key provisions of the country’s constitution as well as the conventions of the International Labour Organization (ILO) in matters pertaining to the rights and entitlements of workers.

If the Ministry of Finance, or indeed, the government tried really hard enough and were adept at gymnastics it may be possible to present a plausible case for the MoU with Fedders Lloyd for the Specialty Hospital.

There are some things which really do pass all understanding. Following a public meeting convened by City Hall last Tuesday, it was announced that the Botanical Gardens were to be renamed the Forbes Burnham Botanical Gardens.

It is hard to imagine a time when people felt there were too few shopping days before Christmas.

On Sunday, the victory of the conservative mayor of Buenos Aires, Mauricio Macri, in Argentina’s presidential run-off election not only ended twelve years of populist rule by the Kirchners – Nestor Kirchner (2003-2007) followed by his widow Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007-2015) – but will also have serious implications for the advance of the so-called “pink tide” in Latin America and the geopolitical balance of the region.

Two days before the world observed International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Melissa Skeete, a young mother of four was brutally stabbed by her partner in his car and then tossed out on a city street.

The murderous rampage in France, attributed to IS or IS-related forces, has forced the major powers of the Security Council to seek ways and means of agreement on a strategy, or strategies, for coping with the spread of the Syrian disorder, particularly onto the European continent.