Editorial

What about nature’s worth? It’s our planet’s womb… What about forest trails?

On Monday afternoon at about 1.30 pm, as the City of Toronto finally began to thaw out from a long winter – as recently as last Thursday it was two degrees Celsius with snow on the ground –  the warm spring day was disrupted with the shocking news that a van had struck several pedestrians at the busy intersection of Yonge Street and Finch Avenue, in the north end of the city.

Something would appear to have given over the past few days after the state entities that share responsibility for the administration of the various facets of the gold industry in Guyana – the Ministry of Natural Resources, the Guyana Geology & Mines Commission (GGMC) and the Guyana Gold Board (GGB) ‒ had come under further public pressure over the issue of mercury emissions from gold processing by the GGB and its effects on the health of GGMC workers.

For the entire period of the APNU+AFC administration, it has been clear that the toxic relationship between the government and the opposition – and reflected in everyday encounters among their adherents at various levels far and wide –    would lead to increasingly intractable crises such as those that resulted in the unilateral appointment of the Chairman of GECOM and the continuing absence of substantive appointments to the top two posts of the judiciary.

Sugar has defined us. Barring those interludes when crops like cotton, coffee and cacao were grown here, sugar until recently was our primary crop, our primary employer and our primary export.

A riveting sequence towards the end of Ava DuVernay’s 2016 documentary ‘13th’ intercuts scenes of racial violence from the 1960s with a recording of Donald Trump speaking at a rally – shortly after he has been heckled by an African American protester.

The millennial generation, that age group currently between 18 and 34, make up the single largest chunk of the Guyana population, approximately 45%, using data from the 2012 census.

At a recent hearing of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), members learnt, or rather were officially informed, that Region Seven (Cuyuni-Mazaruni) has a significant staff deficit and that the 204 vacancies included teachers, nurses and doctors.

By now you must have experienced the roar. Chances are, once you leave your home you will hear it.

It really ought not to have been this way. Successive political administrations, ignoring their own repetitive articulation of the virtue of safety and health at the workplace, inexplicably failed to practise what they continually preach resulting – by the admission of the present administration – in damage to the health of a still unknown number of workers at the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission (GGMC) to an extent that remains unclear.

It now seems clear that the APNU+AFC government has no intention of placing the US$18m signing bonus in the Consolidated Fund as required by Article 216 of the constitution.

That people don’t learn any lessons from the experience of others is perhaps understandable, but why they shouldn’t learn from their own experience – good as well as bad ‒ is more difficult to explain.

MSNBC host Rachel Maddow recently closed an episode of her show with this thought: “When politics goes right in a well-run country, citizens do not have to think much about their government and about the responsibilities of citizenship.”

Recently, British High Commissioner to Guyana, Mr Gregory Quinn had some harsh words to say against corruption in law enforcement, making a strong suggestion that corrupt officers must be jailed once found guilty.

Data on the early ages at which children begin smoking cigarettes and using hard drugs surfaced once again during a national community policing organisation event on Sunday last, with Minister of Public Security Khemraj Ramjattan expressing amazement that some were as young as 11.

After the twenty-ninth inter-sessional meeting of the conference of the Caricom Heads of Government concluded on the 28th February, in Haiti, the communiqué issued, surprisingly, included the subject of West Indies cricket.

On February 16, the Stabroek News published a news story regarding the discovery of “a drug ring inside two Georgetown secondary schools” in which we attributed to “a source” information to the effect that “a group of students was involved in the peddling of the psychoactive drug ecstasy to peers” in the two named schools.

GPL’s introduction to the media of its new Chief Executive Officer, Albert Gordon and his frank evaluation of the needs of the beleaguered utility is most welcome.

In an act of singular perversity the City Council held a special meeting on Wednesday to approve the amended by-laws for parking meters.

One of the enduring strengths of American politics is its willingness to hold a dialogue with earlier opinions; to review, for example, current political issues from the perspective of the Founding Fathers.