Minister Rohee’s announcement that the government has agreed to change the name of the police in Guyana from the Guyana Police Force to the Guyana Police Service was greeted by some of my drinking colleagues with much hilarity.
If anything proves that the PPP/C has discounted receiving African votes in the near future it must be its decision to change the proposed site of the 1823 monument from the Independence Square to Carifesta Avenue and its administratively incorrect and flimsy excuse for doing so!
Lest we succumb to the hopelessness that can very easily result from what has been a most acrimonious and debilitating political year, the holiday season presents a good opportunity for us to take a short break and turn our minds in other directions.
It is generally thought that all conscious practices proceed from some kind of theoretical construct and that if the theory is wrong, the practice will most likely prove insufficient.
Across the political divide, after a year in office, the populace appears to have given up any expectations that, with the exception of national elections sometime soon, much will result from the presidency of Mr.
It is in the very nature of modern, media-centred, politics for secondary issues to become larger than life and overshadow more important agenda items.
Cheddi Jagan was extremely proud of his government’s commitment to transparency and one of the most visible signs of this was his government’s ability to present the annual Auditor General’s Report after many years of default under the PNC regime.
Cross Border Career Stretch in the Teaching Profession (cont’d)
Since the idea is not to prevent but rather to facilitate an overseas career for those who wish it and have performed well, government can be more proactive in arranging such recruitment and putting reengagement incentives in place.
The current quarrel between the government, the Speaker of the National Assembly and the opposition over the content of the first Order Paper (parliamentary agenda) of this new parliamentary year keeps us in the same mode that has developed since the last general elections: a government blustering its way in the hope of finding an opportune moment to call a new election and an opposition determined to close the noose around the government’s neck.
The first of the thirty-two recommendations found in the 2012 Guyana Report on Aging (the Report) states that “Associations of Older Persons could help educate about the rights of the elderly and promote their active participation in the community activities”.
“Even though, the growing ageing population and the concomitant changes this will bring are viewed as a major socio-economic challenge for Guyana, other competing development priorities have overtaken the national agenda.
I began this discourse a few weeks ago by indicating that three programmes targeted at the elderly by the Barbados government have been identified as regional best practices.
Aging, along with and its moral and practical implications is so visible that most societies have had to establish norms to deal with it, but as Thomas R Cole, et al, observed in The Meaning of Aging and the Future of Social Security, “the ancient and medieval understandings of aging as a mysterious part of the eternal order of things gradually gave way to the secular, scientific, and individualist tendencies of modernity.
This intervention was motivated primarily by a report in the Stabroek News that from ten Caribbean programmes which were highlighted as “best practices” for the provision of services to the elderly by the Third Regional Intergovernmental Conference on Ageing in Latin America and the Caribbean, which took place recently in Costa Rica, Barbados was recognised for three of its programmes: the Home Care Programme, Nursing Pilot Project and its Information Communication Technology Programme.
In 1989, after some twenty-five years in office, the PNC lost its strategic advantage over the PPP, and arguably left Guyana a more divided society than it was when it came to office in 1964.
Even allowing that the unconscionable shooting and killing of protesters at Linden may have complicated matters for the government, how is it possible for a ruling party to concede so much on the major issues brought to the table by the other side but yet achieve so little?
“The President’s pension and the Prime Minister’s pension shall be seven-eighths of the highest annual rate of salary paid to such persons at any time as President or Prime Minister as the case may be or two hundred and four thousand dollars per annum, whichever is the greater,” says the 1991 amendment to the Pensions (President, Parliamentary and Special Officials) Act Chapter 27:03, which now appears extremely dated.