Future Notes

A path breaking study by McKinsey & Company for the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) repeated what has now become received wisdom: ‘The capacity of countries … to compete in the global knowledge economy increasingly depends on whether they can meet a fast-growing demand for high-level skills.

As the Minister of Public Health Dr. George Norton completes his fact-finding walkabout, sooner or later he will have to put to us some holistic organisational solutions to the problems in the health sector as he envisages them.

In `The Berbice Regional Health Authority is an Illegal… says Health Minister (KN 6/6/2015) the Minister of Public Health, Dr.

In what he claims to be the interest of justice, the new Vice-President of Public Security, Mr.

While facilitating a necessary changing of the political guards, in terms of creating the level of national cooperation that is required if Guyana is really to take off, the recent elections have not provided the minimum of what was expected.

Dear PPP,   Democracy, defined as ‘majority rule’, is not an end in itself but a means to an end.

Political relations in countries such as Guyana never cease to surprise.

This article will reach the editor at its usual time, which will be long before the results of the 2015 general and regional elections are even informally known.

Apart from some rudimentary commitments to rule better, from a political standpoint the PPP manifesto, Guyana Version 2.0, only promises more of the same and perhaps worse.

After former president Bharrat Jagdeo launched his extremist ethnic salvoes at Babu John, I had occasion to predict in this column that worse was yet to come.

Important elements of the wider strategy that finally brought down the PPP were: internal subversion to discredit the regime; various forms of economic pressure which, contrary to PPP propaganda, at best led to economic stagnation; more electoral manipulation, this time in the form of the imposition of proportional representation which favoured the opposition forces and the resuscitation of the long concluded Guyana/Venezuela border dispute as a backstop in the event that the PPP was still able to prevail.

I am not one of those who believe that for us to make progress as a nation our politicians could or should forget the past.

If the APNU/AFC coalition can seek succour in the failed Jagan/Burnham attempt to form a national movement, it would well be reminded that it also has much in common with the 1950s alliance between Forbes Burnham and Dr.

The APNU/AFC coalition seeks to draw some inspiration from the earlier attempt by Cheddi and Janet Jagan to establish a nationalist/socialist-orientated political organisation in the mid/late 1940s.

Even those of us who are not particularly religious have been socialised into putting great store upon the notion of individual responsibility, based essentially upon a belief in “good” and “evil”.

To increase the certainty of defeating the PPP/C, one has to shift the paradigm of elections and electioneering in Guyana.

It appears to me that the political parties that were involved in the APNU/AFC coalition formation proceeded as if the PPP is so broken and discarded that its responses would not matter or would be worth very little.

I have suggested before that for me, although getting rid of the PPP from government is a necessity at this stage, in our condition it is not a sufficient cause.

Last week I argued that to be successful, the opposition coalition must be bolstered by a creative strategy in which the first order of business must be the establishment of a comprehensive and properly focused programmatic platform.

Readers of this column will know that it has continuously advocated coalition between the opposition forces as a possible and necessary condition for the removal of the PPP from government, and the institutionalisation of a more adequate national governance arrangement.