Conversation Tree

The Sunday Stabroek’s editorial last Sunday, “Democratic values,” stated: “A more predictable viewpoint which he [Cheddi Jagan] never relinquished was that class in Guyana was more important than race, a somewhat tenuous assumption at best and plain inaccurate at worst.”

For those like me who find it difficult to keep track, or have lost track, of political and judicial events since the no confidence motion of December 21, 2018, was passed against the APNU+AFC Government in the National Assembly, Anand Goolsarran’s newly published book, “Triumph of Democracy and the Rule of Law: Guyana 2020 Elections and their Aftermath,” has come to the rescue.

Race was a significant factor in the formation of the Peoples’ Progressive Party (PPP) in 1950, as it was in Guyanese life and society.

The economy Guyana inherited at Independence in 1966 has remained largely unchanged.

Political leadership transitions can sometimes be full of drama. The transition to Desmond Hoyte after Burnham’s passing in 1985, was followed by the expulsion of its second most powerful leader, Hamilton Green, then a gradual but wholesale demolition the ‘left wing’ of the Peoples National Congress (PNC).

The distribution of the ‘Because We Care’ Education Cash Grant (ECG) by the Government started in Region 2 last week.

Guyanese have long known that Haiti had been the poorest country in the Caribbean.

Article 13 of the Guyana Constitution was invoked by Minister Gail Teixeira during last week in response to the call of US Congressmen Albio SIres and Hank Johnson for more political inclusion in Guyana and for the country’s wealth to benefit all of its citizens.

The answer to the question posed in the above headline is that the PNCR is not going to wither away, despite the spate of recent resignations, the departure of the WPA from APNU and the slow death of the AFC.

News reports on June 17 reveal that 224,853 persons in Guyana, representing 46.2 percent of the targeted adult population had taken the COVID 19 vaccine.

The modest measures taken by the Government of Guyana, described in the announcement by Attorney General Anil Nandlall, “to right a tragic wrong,” marking the 41st anniversary of Walter Rodney’s assassination, are welcome.

The PPP/C Government attained political office in circumstances in which the rule of law was under severe stress.

A letter from prominent citizens in Stabroek News last Friday called for consultation on electoral reforms.

It took longer than expected for the challenge to the jurisdiction of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) to materialise.

In Sheikh Jarrah, a Palestinian neighbourhood in Jerusalem, captured and since occupied by Israel in the Six Day War in 1967, Israel sought to evict six Palestinian families, who have been in occupation since 1948 or before.

Cheddi Jagan railed for decades in hundreds of articles and thousands of speeches at the unfair and exploitative extraction of wealth by the developed industrial countries from the poor South, with an unenviable command of facts and figures.

The decision of Chief Justice Roxane George-Wiltshire (CJ) is a bold, compelling and erudite analysis of the law relating to the interpretation of what the public now knows as Section 22 and Order 60.

When nationalisations of private-owned enterprises took place in the 1970s, first bauxite, then sugar, followed by the banks and others, initiated by the PNC government and supported by the Opposition PPP, they were ideologically and politically driven.

The headline and the three paragraphs below are direct quotations from a report in the Stabroek News of April 14, 2021.

In 2010, I wrote an article on the overseas vote in which I argued that the Constitution of Guyana permitted all Guyanese citizens over the age of 18 to vote.