Editorial

Nothing illustrates better the foolishness that goes on in the corridors of power in this country than the dispute between the city council and GPL.

A few weeks ago, addressing the Queen’s College anniversary celebrations (in a blackout), Dr Roopnaraine asked his audience (and by extension all Guyanese) to “embrace the idea that the quality of our life is dependent on the quality of life of others.”

It is a pity that Dr Rupert Roopnaraine’s feature address delivered at the special assembly of the Queen’s College reunion a few weeks ago, was heard only by the QC faithful.

Twenty years ago, the member states of the United Nations agreed to a binding treaty of international law which would allow all children in all countries and of all ethnicities and cultures to live in a world in which their human rights would be respected and adhered to.

A somewhat surprising hiatus in the governance of Haiti, the removal of Haitian Prime Minister Michèle Pierre-Louis by the country’s Senate in October, gave cause for concern as to the progress which the country had been making in terms of its political stability.

Within weeks of the United Kingdom’s withdrawal of its projected Security Sector Reform Action Plan, a gang of bandits staged an assault on several state properties in the heart of Georgetown and escaped.

It must have gladdened the hearts of all Guyanese here and in the diaspora to absorb the news of the munificent Norwegian decision to support this country’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS) to the tune of US$250M over a five-year period.

Last week came the unexpected announcement from the President that taxis were all to have the same colour by August 2010.

In 1988, Freedom House, a group which monitors liberty around the world, estimated that in political terms 36 per cent of the globe’s 167 independent nations were free, 23 per cent partly free and the rest not free at all.

In Guyana, we seem to lurch from one crisis to another.

There are expressions of shock as it has emerged that 16-year-old Vivian Singh Balrup was quite likely beaten to death because he picked watermelon someone else had planted.

What used to be called the Western world, the area of the post-war world centred on the NATO alliance, has this week been celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the effective end of what, on the other hand, used to refer to itself as the World Socialist System.

The murder of People’s Progressive Party stalwart and former Vice-Chairman of the Essequibo Islands-West Demerara Region Ramenauth Bisram last month has opened a can of worms in legal and political circles and in the security community.

Wednesday’s blitz by criminals against police stations, the Supreme Court of Judicature and a High School which left one man dead must be condemned in the strongest possible terms and the perpetrators brought to justice.

The government has perhaps been taken off-guard by the vehemence of the reaction from all quarters of society to the appalling injuries inflicted on a teenager by the police in the Leonora Police Station last week. 

Early next week a district court in New York will decide whether a class-action settlement that would allow Google to continue digitizing millions of old books violates federal antitrust legislation.

It is somewhat ironic that even as we were calling last Friday for heads to be banged together in order to resolve the constitutional crisis in Honduras, an announcement was being made to the effect that a high-level US mission, led by Assistant Secretary of State Thomas Shannon, had succeeded, on the previous evening, in getting representatives of the deposed president, Manuel Zelaya, and of the interim leader, Roberto Micheletti, to agree on a negotiated solution.

The seeds of violence, planted, watered and fed have taken root and blossomed; violently cut down they spring up again sprouting numerous branches wherever one is lopped off.

Caribbean observers will have been watching with interest the efforts of the Bruce Golding government, since its accession to office in Jamaica, to come to terms with what domestic and external observers recognize as a serious economic crisis.

Public confidence in the Guyana Police Force has been eroded over the past decade by numerous allegations of bribery, corruption, collaboration with narco-traffickers, extra-judicial killings, torture and other wrongdoing.