Editorial

With the participation, as full members, of Guyana, Suriname and Belize from Caricom, the small island developing states of the globe concluded their third full meeting since 1994 under the auspices of the United Nations last week.

There exists a well-intentioned but onerous and far from efficient arrangement that allows for children attending state schools to benefit from textbooks loaned from the Ministry of Education.

Two weeks ago, residents of Port Kaituma and nearby areas began to complain bitterly about the pollution of their water supplies by miners working upstream.

Guyana has earned itself another dubious world record. According to PAHO/WHO this country had the world’s highest estimated suicide rate in 2012.

Every 40 seconds, someone takes their own life. According to World Health Organization’s recent report, ‘Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative,’ during the course of a year, the global number of suicides adds up to 800,000 people – more than the population of this country.

West Indies Cricket Board CEO Michael Muirhead has defended the Board’s decision not to sanction the two cricketers who made themselves unavailable for the Test series against Bangladesh, beginning today.

To say that tact appears not to be the strong point of this administration is one way to very mildly explain the constant “eh?”

We feel almost forced to return to the struggle between the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) powers and Russia over Ukraine, so soon after our last editorial on this issue.

Pity indeed that our education system is not afforded the luxury of leaving the previous year’s difficulties behind at the start of a new academic year.

After months of contradictory statements, the PPP/C government is still to make a cogent and believable case as to why long-awaited local government elections have not been called.

While normally during the parliamentary recess in August and September there is a kind of political intermission, that is not quite the case this year.

Newsweek magazine’s recent cover story about Ebola is suggestive of larger failings in the way the spread of the disease has been covered by the international media.

Last Friday’s editorial on the Limacol Caribbean Premier League (CPL) came close to being a purist’s lament for the lost virtues of Test cricket in the region and a hankering for the halcyon days of West Indies cricket.

In an exclusive report in last Sunday’s Toronto Sun newspaper, an Emergency Room (ER) doctor revealed his angst at being forced to respect patient confidentiality while tending to a visibly drunk driver.

With a proposed date for a vote on secession from Great Britain of September 18 now almost within reach, the governing Scottish National Party (SNP) finds itself facing stiff competition from the forces opposed to the establishment of an independent Scotland.

The government has allowed a discomfiting hiatus to develop between the announcement by Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh in his budget speech last March that government was allocating one billion Guyana dollars to a coastal cleanup exercise and the actualization of the exercise.

What is clear from the eruptions over the activities of Bai Shan Lin, Vaitarna and similar logging and extractive companies, is that the PPP/C government has been engaged in drawing up agreements which either do not reflect the best interests of the nation or are not being properly enforced.

It was the late Deryck Bernard, a population geographer by profession, who a long time ago drew attention to the changing demographics of Guyana and the possible attendant political consequences.

“No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so,” wrote the great Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz – “without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

It was a pity that this year’s Limacol Caribbean Premier League (CPL) had to come to such an unsatisfactory conclusion last Sunday.