Editorial

The World Health Organisation has called the coronavirus, COVID-19, “the defining global health crisis of our time” and indeed it is.

On Monday, Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister announced that Canada was closing its borders to non-Canadian citizens, with limited exceptions, as of 12.01 am  EDT, on the 18th March, in the hope of restricting the spread of COVID-19.

Towards the end of last week, after it had been announced that a Guyanese woman who had traveled home from the  United States  and shortly afterwards had become the country’s first coronavirus fatality, the national mood underwent a perceptible shift.

On Wednesday the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. From that point onward every country ought to have focused on what epidemiologists call “flattening the curve” of infection rates – to prevent a surge of cases overwhelming hospitals as has happened in Italy and Iran.

Rationality has supervened in the matter of the Region Four election count at last, courtesy of Barbados Prime Minister and CARICOM Chair Mia Mottley.

Given the outpouring of revulsion yesterday from the Western countries and local and international observer groups about the deceptions unremittingly employed by Returning Officer for Region Four Clairmont Mingo in his second attempt at tabulation, there is no more space for denial of the fact that the March 2 general elections are being rigged before our eyes and in the crudest way.

A new factor has entered into Guyana’s complicated equation, and this one in a sense comes from left field. 

Every five years, many Guyanese don red and black or green (now green and yellow) shades that do not allow them to see anything objectively.

The recent blockades of railway lines across Canada by the Wet’suwet’en, a First Nations group, have attracted the world’s attention whilst shining the spotlight on Indigenous peoples’ self-determination and land rights, climate change and the oil and gas industries. 

Notwithstanding an all-out price war this week between Saudi Arabia and Russia that can see oil prices fall persistently below Guyana’s production cost, it is fast approaching five years since our eternal dream of lifting ourselves out of what the Jamaican Economist George Beckford termed ‘Persistent Poverty’  reached the crest of not just a mere wave but a tsunami.

After a week which has threatened the integrity of our national elections, many of us should now have a clearer sense of potential flashpoints in America’s ongoing primaries and its forthcoming elections.

(Editor’s note:  Below we reprint the editorial that should have appeared in yesterday’s Sunday Stabroek.

The conclusion that certain members of Gecom were involved in manipulating the Region Four results cannot be avoided.

Five days after Monday’s general elections, the country is still waiting for a final declaration of results and the swearing in of a President.

When all of the bewildering events of yesterday at the office of the Region Four Returning Officer are taken into account, the only conclusion that can be drawn is that Gecom and its staffers are working in the interest of APNU+AFC and  rigging the 2020 general elections right before our eyes.

Internet users are increasingly becoming younger. Many more young people and children are online everyday than adults and more than likely this will grow as time advances.

The ICC Under–19 Cricket World Cup is the tournament known for catapulting the emerging wave of new talent in the game unto the international stage.

Last Friday’s media release issued by the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) on the subject of the country’s traffic tribulations appears to have derived from some of the outcomes of the February 19-20 Third Ministerial Conference on Road Safety held in Stockholm, Sweden.

With the stakes for Elections 2020 being as high as they are, it is important that the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) and the Guyana Police Force (GPF) discharge their myriad obligations today competently and efficiently.

Changes in Guyana’s political landscape have not been much in evidence over the decades, and the few which have materialised have been very slow to make their appearance.