Editorial

On Sunday last, this newspaper published in its ‘Women’s Chronicles’ column, the lamentations of a number of parents struggling with getting their children to do schoolwork and grappling with their own lack of ability to teach and to motivate them.

As a group of West Indian cricketers resume training at the Kensington Oval in Barbados for the possible upcoming tour of England in July, the spotlight on West Indies cricket has remained focused on the Pannell Kerr Forster (PKF) Report which was commissioned by the current Cricket West Indies (CWI) administration when they assumed office in April last year.

Trinidad and Tobago’s decision to begin a phased re-opening of parts of the country’s business sector following a period of ‘lockdown’ and outcomes which appear to suggest that significantly restricting the movement of people for a period may have impacted positively on the country’s status insofar as contracting of the Coronavirus and better still, fatalities deriving therefrom, should be noted in Guyana. 

As the recount of votes from the March 2nd general elections crawls along it must not be forgotten that what should have been an orderly process with a result within two or three days was obscenely overturned by the Returning Officer for District Four, Clairmont Mingo when he introduced numbers from a spreadsheet which were pure fiction.

The south of Guyana is particularly vulnerable to the spread of the coronavirus, not just because of the regular traffic from Georgetown, but also because it is wide open to traffic from Brazil.

Two days ago, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference announced that China will shortly introduce legislation to further silence pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong.

Oliver Clarke of Jamaica, who died on Saturday, was one of the leading figures of the Caribbean media scene.

There is an idiom that says, ‘Before you judge a man, walk a mile in his shoes’, it means that you really cannot understand another person’s experience until you have put yourself in their situation.

During the course of last week, Cricket West Indies (CWI) President Ricky Skerritt must have felt that the annual hurricane winds and accompanying rains had arrived two weeks ahead of schedule.

With no warning whatsoever, we find ourselves confronted with what has been described as “one of the greatest threats in our lifetime to global education, a gigantic educational crisis.”

It seems that the agents of APNU+AFC at the national recount of votes – a number of de facto ministers among them – have taken the opportunity of entering the manufacturing sector and not in a good way.

The Guyanese population had almost lost its sense of the absurd after the egregious events of the last two-and-a-half months, but our headlines last Monday demonstrated that there were still things which could leave mouths agape.

In September 2001, two days after the terror attacks on New York and Washington, the evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson explained why God had allowed such an outrage in America.

“I have never seen a more transparent effort to alter the results of an election,” Bruce Golding, Head of the OAS observer mission to the March 2 election told the OAS Permanent Council the day before yesterday.

It is now approximately 136 days since the first official public report was issued to the world about a novel coronavirus that was causing debilitating illness and death.

As life continues to unfold here in Guyana, a discombobulating feeling of blurred timelines appears to be encompassing our daily lives.

Long before we can even begin to determine the extent of the likely overall toll of the coronavirus – in terms of deaths, possible longer-term illnesses, social and economic dislocation, changes in our socio-cultural behaviour,  how long the malady will remain with us and the longer term  adjustments we might have to make in terms of the way in which we live our lives – we are going to have to – both as a global community and as individual societies – find short-term responses to some of the immediate challenges that are already here with us.

At the end of day five of the national recount of votes from the March 2nd General and Regional Elections, 207 of 2,339 ballot boxes had been recounted.

To describe the pace of the recount as slothful would be the understatement of the year.

The last six weeks have cost 33 million Americans their jobs –  up from 22 million just a fortnight ago.