Editorial

Between 2015 and the present, the issue of a salary increase for teachers in the public school system has been simmering, occasionally threatening to boil over into controversy between the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) and the Ministry of Education (MoE).

If all goes according to plan, the office of the Integrity Commission, which will seek to hold public officials to standards consistent with the assurances they have given in their oaths to serve the Guyanese public, will be up and running very soon.

Just when cricket fans around the world had had enough of the ‘ball tampering’ incident in the Third Test between Australia and South Africa, they are slowly coming to the conclusion that not everyone is prepared to accept, and/or play to, the same rules of conduct.

We now know, more or less for sure, that this newspaper’s disclosure about a month ago, of a drugs ring involving two secondary schools in the capital is a microcosm of a wider problem and that, more worryingly, it seems that, as it has done in various other instances of crisis in the system, the Ministry of Education has again assumed a more or less ‘hush- hush’ posture on the matter.

On March 30th, Minister of State, Joseph Harmon announced that the US$18m signing bonus contracted with ExxonMobil’s subsidiary, EEPGL would be deposited into the Consolidated Fund before any disbursement is made.

It was an advertisement in this newspaper on Thursday which drew public attention to the situation facing Guyanese miners in the Cuyuni River.

The criminal justice system has three major components: law enforcement (mainly the police), the courts or legal system and the penal system (the prisons).

Earlier this month, Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan tabled in Parliament, a bill that is expected to see a change in how juveniles at odds with the law are treated.

Worldwide cricket fans have had their appetites filled in the last week, whilst experiencing a roller coaster of emotions.

There are signs that the agro-processing sub-sector of our manufacturing sector is beginning to creep closer to the realization of the long-held ambition of having our products such as sauces, condiments, beverages, snack foods and the like, make a mark on the local, regional and international markets.

Considering all of the facts known at this point,  there is an unmistakably familiar incongruence in the police explanations for the deaths of three men on the seawall on March 15 and numerous outstanding questions.

It was like a cheap magician’s trick on a Music Hall stage: now you see it, now you don’t.

Before Cambridge Analytica (CA) mined Facebook data from 50 million users for  “psychographic” profiles that could influence the US elections, it reportedly honed its methods in Trinidad.

“Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink,” is a line from the poem ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’ written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, detailing how a sailor on a becalmed ship is surrounded by undrinkable salt water.

Last month, the Guyana Water Incorporated (GWI) formally approached the Public Utilities Commission (PUC) seeking a rate increase, citing old and odd tariffs and the need for a means to subsidise maintenance/service costs.

Over the course of the last few weeks, between 17th February and 11th March, to be precise, a trio of Guyana’s sons, Dr Mohamed Shahabuddeen, Wilson Harris and Dr Harold Drayton were called to higher pastures.

To attempt the chronicling of the life and times of Cheddi Jagan within the inadequate confines of a single newspaper editorial, harnessed as it is by the constraint of brevity, is to court all sorts of risks.

It is incomprehensible that the government here was given notification by the US government in November, 2015 of new regulations for Siluriformes (catfish) and failed to take all of the required steps to enable continued exports from Guyana.

It is no secret that the City Council cannot manage the city, but now we know that they cannot manage a democratic election either.

In Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 novel It Can’t Happen Here, Senator Berzelius ‘Buzz’ Windrip wins the US presidency with a jingoistic platform that promises every American family an extra $5,000 per year, radical political reforms, and a return to traditional values.