City vending as survival – and blight
Recall – those friends still interested – that the first CARICOM Guyana 2020 votes recount was aborted. That caused Trinidadian Prime Minister Rowley to “wash his hands” of Guyana’s electoral virus forbidding his country’s elections experts to participate anymore.
CARICOM, to its credit, persisted after His Excellency President Granger subsequently agreed to a genuine scrutineered recount. (Those old and interested enough might recall a beaten Hugh Desmond Hoyte also demanding a “forensic audit” of all ballots cast before accepting that his party had lost once more to the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) in 1997. An eminent Caribbean Jurist had to disappoint Dessie then.)
Oh my poor one-time favourite party! Yes there are racial realities and underpinnings.
But can’t the People’s National Congress/PNC accept that they have never never won any general elections in this Guyana land? Lord man, it’s traumatic but true!
So why am I rehashing last year’s genesis of a power grab? Varied reasons. But I’ll be brief.
Firstly, though I myself might have missed it, since that second recount I’ve never heard the Brigadier-Leader of the PNC himself ever repeating that the PPP government is “a fraudulent, installed, racist, illegitimate regime”.
Fair-minded observers can easily identify the ambitious, hopeful, hurt, vengeful representatives and surrogates, local and overseas, who boldly sustain such a “campaign”.
From a very negative perspective, I even admire their “presumptuousness” from time to time. They even beat Donald Trump to the electoral “big-lie” strategy.
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Guyana big lie, American big lie
The real issue is just what the perpetuation of these false, fake claims – so transparently futile and stupid – really do to the socio-political well-being of countries. “Small” and “Big”.
The PNC, masquerading as some “APNU” along with another decimated dead-meat group, used millions, perhaps billions of our dollars to prove something about 33 and 34 and numerous litigations after crude bed-sheet “Mingo-ing” of ballot counts in front of the world’s reps.
Over in the U.S.A, after the Brigadier reluctantly succumbed to truth and reality here, President Trump began to construct his special electoral Big Lie after losing to Mr. Biden by millions of votes in November. There too, a beaten President demanded recounts and audits. Yes there were irregularities but nowhere near showing a Trump victory. Yet both Trump and a minority few PNC hopefuls and mischief-makers allow themselves delusions.
Frankly speaking, do they really know what would happen to them – the PNC dudes – if a new sudden election were to be held? What price power?
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The American Democrats in Socialist Guyana
Hey you-all! Do you know that there is now a registered, full-fledged American Democratic Party in Guyana?
But do you realise that our constitution still describes our country as “… a sovereign state in the course of transition from capitalism to socialism” and that we constitute “a Co-operative Republic”?
Regard that last paragraph here as levity – a political, constitutional, socio-economic joke! Both the PPP and PNC have long abandoned the basics of socialism. Perhaps justifiably. And it might be difficult to discover ten good co-op societies here these days.
But I’m intrigued by the presence of President Biden’s Democrats in Georgetown now. So I’ll do some “digging” to satisfy my interest, curiosity. How strong numbers-wise? I must be a Guyanese dual citizen with that blue passport to qualify? Must Ambassador Lynch recognise? Will Guyanese-American democrats support government or opposition? Or both? Ho-ho-ho. Stay tuned.
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Vending – As friend and enemy
Vending and hawking are the small-man’s quickest refuge to earn a day-by-day living it seems.
In every community – village and town – numerous little stands, spaces, even vehicles announce the ubiquitous vendor. In our capital Georgetown, to be frank, vending has gone mad! Many vendors “illegal” and constituting a city-wide blight, I’m sad and forced to say. Our pavements, sidewalks, even some roads are overtaken. Boutiques with “roofs” are on Regent, Water, Robb streets. The small-man’s hustle can be a real danger to ordinary citizens.
Of course the issue is easily politicised now. Which government, in collaboration with which PNC city council, dares to bring order to Georgetown’s vending?
I realised that I actually saved an excellent editorial from Stabroek News (February 25 of this year) analysing the national municipal dilemma.
I shall return often to this social scourge but for now just leave one short excerpt from that editorial: “Of course, the best way to have dealt with city vending would have been to regulate it when it first started. That ought to have been implemented after the first dozen or score of vendors appeared. If there were proper city planners from the beginning, areas for vending would have been demarcated, and no-vending zones policed with stringent enforcement to repel any who dared to encroach on them. However, that is all moot and the problem today, as it has been for decades, remains not just realising a semblance of order but maintaining it.”
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Ponder, until…
● 1) In terms of facing full-fledged media briefings/conferences, who is/was better? Ali? Granger?
● 2) Just when will the mechanism to operationalise spending from our New York oil revenues be implemented? (Budget 2022 will need billions.)
● 3) Do you know that there are actually six categories of marital status? Married, single, divorced, separated, common-law, widowed.
`Til next week
