Editorial

The Georgetown City Constabulary has spent the past few days trying to defend its archaic and discriminatory policy against women, which insists on a two-year probationary period and makes becoming pregnant within that period a firing offence.

An old American saying has it that all politics is local, and the current effort of President Obama to consolidate his recent agreement on nuclear weapons with the Government of Iran appears to be confirming it.

This newspaper accepts – and it has said so previously – that the new administration will take some time to ‘catch its length,’ (to use a well-worn cricketing term) and that it will make errors (for which it will have to take responsibility, of course) and make decisions that will probably not meet with the approval of many, and in some instances, perhaps even most people.

While it’s only been ten weeks since the Cabinet has been in place the President and the Prime Minister will undoubtedly be keenly analysing the performances of individual ministers and determining when changes should be made.

Governing any nation nowadays is not an easy task, and in the case of Guyana there are some additional complexities which are too well known to be worth enumerating.

China’s response to the precipitous fall of its stocks betrays not only a profound ambivalence towards free markets, but also a certain measure of scepticism towards the liberal ideals that ought to underpin them.

As we reported last week, Foreign Affairs Minister Carl Greenidge has said that Guyana is still hoping that Caricom will reach a consensus on a single candidate for the position of Commonwealth Secretary-General, to be decided, in November, at the next Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, in Malta.

World leaders will gather again in New York in two months’ time to attend the United Nations General Assembly and this year’s event has already been forecast as one that will be off the charts for several reasons.

The campaign towards general elections in Trinidad & Tobago, announced in mid-June to be held on September 7, appears to be getting more and more truculent, leading some observers to wonder what the atmosphere will be like by the time the scheduled date arrives.

By moving to put in place a Code of Conduct for ministers (which we hope would apply equally to other senior functionaries in the political administration) President David Granger is demonstrating an awareness of the endless difficulties which the previous administration faced with the delinquent excesses of some of its own ministers, many of which have long been public knowledge and need hardly be mentioned here.

Given the extreme and fast moving criminal violence between February 2002, when five dangerous prisoners made a bloody breakout from the Camp Street jail and August 2008, when the notorious Rondell Rawlins was killed, there are many gaps in the public’s understanding and knowledge of how the events developed, the masterminds and the players in the internecine warfare.

An assessment of how the new government has been performing would produce something of a mixed verdict.

Even within the context of recent cases of US police brutality, the death of Sandra Bland, a young black woman arrested by a Texan policeman after a traffic stop two weeks ago, is deeply troubling.

It is perhaps a moot point as to whether it was the best of wisdom for President David Granger to have attended the Mercosur summit in Brazil last week.

The coalition government through the Ministry of Education has announced that it will discontinue, indefinitely, the ‘Because We Care’ $10,000 cash grant that was instituted last year October by the former administration.

As a continuing majority of the countries of the Caribbean Community have continued to maintain normal relations with Cuba, especially over the many years when Cold War relations between the US and that country were most intense, our governments will no doubt feel a certain justification as the two countries have now proceeded with a gradual evolution of their relations towards a full and formal exchange of ambassadorial representatives.

With Education Minister Dr Rupert Roopnaraine seemingly seeking to incrementally strengthen the foundation of an education system that remains deficient in various critical respects, this may be an opportune time to raise ‒ not for the first time ‒ the matter of the need for the Ministry of Education to effectively embrace parents as genuine stakeholders in the education process rather than have them remain on the periphery as many of them have been for a number of years, in a condition of indifference and sometimes even hostility to what transpires in the places where their children receive their education.

Nothing would lift the spirits of crime-weary Guyanese more than the knowledge that the Guyana Police Force is making extraordinary progress in its fight against ruthless criminals who have blazed a trail of murders and violent robberies.

In a letter to this newspaper which was published last Wednesday, former Attorney General Anil Nandlall wrote that a “bold and aggressive response by the police is needed at this point in time.”

Twenty years ago, several thousand Bosnian Muslims were herded into trucks, blindfolded and roped together like animals, and massacred on the fringes of a United Nations ‘safe-haven’ in Srebrenica.