Henry Jeffrey

Since Dr. Roger Luncheon invoked political sovereignty in response to the United States’ refusal to discontinue the leadership and democracy project, I began to pay a keener interest to this concept and my observations should be of interest, particularly as we celebrate our Republican status.

Although it was something of a challenge trying to decipher precisely what Justice Charles R Ramson (“A focus on the facts;” SN: 28/01/2014) was attempting to convey, lest it be considered bad form not to consider his contributions, which are never without substance, I have given it a shot in the hope that I have not totally missed what he was attempting to say.

“The court acting as guardian of the Constitution cannot be accused of seeking to fetter the work of the Assembly since it must be recognised that what fetters the Assembly is not the court but the Constitution itself or the law itself as interpreted by the courts.

The Leadership and Democracy (LEAD) project proposed by the United States government has sufficiently broad support among the Guyanese people for the Guyana Government to have second thoughts about it.

If the report in Stabroek News (`Jeffrey way off the mark on APNU ‘posturing’ – Granger:’ SN: 11/01/2014) is anything to go by, the situation in APNU regarding the way forward may be even worse than I thought.

There can be no doubt that public confidence in the opposition in general has plummeted since the 2011 national elections.

Unfortunately, we cannot cherry-pick the vicissitudes of fortune. Thus, when the PPP came to government in 1992, it inherited both Desmond Hoyte’s Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) and the industrial relations environment it had helped to create to obstruct the ERP’s establishment.

By 1988/89, President Desmond Hoyte was already committed to his Economic Recovery Programme (ERP) and was not to be given an easy ride.

The most important problem in the present relationship between the public servants and the government is not whether the former should be paid a 5%, 10% or 100% increase; it is about the government following established collective bargaining procedures; meeting the union at the negotiation table and if that fails proceeding to binding arbitration.

When solutions are not found to social problems they tend to recur from time to time in unexpected and sometimes destructive ways.

If it is the intention of the president and his government to provide maximum security for this nation, as the main law-givers whose activities are widely publicised, they should take note of how respect for the law has plummeted and of the part their actions are most likely playing in this process.

Guyana and Sri Lanka are usually categorized as bi-communal societies, and recently the latter has been in the international news because some countries boycotted the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference which was being held there, and the British Prime Minister used his presence in the country to call for an international investigation into the recently concluded civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Guyana and Sri Lanka are usually categorized as bi-communal societies, and recently the latter has been in the international news because some countries boycotted the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference which was being held there, and the British Prime Minister used his presence in the country to call for an international investigation into the recently concluded civil war between the government and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

Cheddi Jagan and I were about the start a meeting in Bartica during the 1992 election campaign, when I was approached by a well-known and important Indian businessman, who asked to speak on the platform. 

“A nation is an imagined political community. … imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.

There has been much justifiable condemnation of the position taken by Ms.

Guyana is a politically abnormal country and any attempt to analyse or administer it using only the normal tools/institutions of international political life is doomed to failure!

In 1976, President Linden Forbes Sampson Burnham, whom international capital had helped to power in Guyana, felt sufficiently confident to tell the Guyanese nation that: “…the People’s National Congress is seeking to lay the foundation of a socialist society based upon Marxism/Leninism” (Forbes Burnham, “Report to the Nation”).

Commenting on the situation at the University of Guyana on its 50th anniversary, President Donald Ramotar has been reported as stating the following: “We might have different ideas, but for Christ’s sake don’t let the different ideas paralyze us.

It is good that this year the Minister of Finance has decided to give the opposition relatively good notice of the tripartite budget consultations.