Editorial

Two days ago, on Monday, November 13th, the World was put on notice for the second time in twenty-five years by the Union of Concerned Scientists. 

News late last week that City Hall is seeking a government bailout in excess of $400 million to liquidate its indebtedness to the two companies which, up until recently, had been the capital’s two biggest waste disposal entities, bares the full extent of the travails of the municipality.

 The disclosure that the Private Sector Commission (PSC) has tendered a proposal to take over the running of the Enmore Sugar Estate is most welcome.

One would have to be of fairly advanced years to have a direct memory of the days when you could press the light switch and know for certain that the room would be immediately illuminated, or be in no doubt that a piece of equipment like the fridge was malfunctioning and not the victim of a power outage when it went off without warning.

The Paradise papers show that Apple moved US$250 billion dollars to an offshore account so that in 2014 it faced a tax rate of 0.005 percent.

It was only in October that we editorialised on the Guyana Police Force and the high number of crimes and negative incidents being reported in the press in relation to the actions of a few of its senior officers and many of its rank and file members.

Years ago, before the evolution of social media, people changed their names to fit in or to avoid drawing attention to themselves because it was unusual.

On 15th October there was a horrific vehicular accident on the Corentyne involving a car and a paddy truck.

Not least among the challenges of holding political office is the sense of unease that is often felt by the office holder about being constantly in the public limelight and as a consequence, being almost always open to public scrutiny and to the mix of adulation and criticism that attends the occupancy of political office.

We welcome the long-awaited appointment by the APNU+AFC government of the seminal Local Government Commission (LGC) notwithstanding concerns about the basis on which the AFC General Secretary Marlon Williams was chosen as a member.

Nobody familiar with how events have unfolded in Guyana in recent times would have been altogether surprised by the raucous heckling from the placard-bearing ranks of the PPP/C in Parliament on Thursday.

In a concluding note to a series of lectures on “The Uses and Abuses of History,” the historian Margaret MacMillan observes that while we ought to refrain from pat assertions about what history “teaches” us or “shows”, it is nevertheless useful “to be reminded, as a citizen, that those in positions of authority do not always know better.”

In most countries (and Guyana is no exception) issues relating to “public safety” rank highly on the list of concerns for the population and the government.

A story making international headlines this week, amid the news of the indictments in Washington and Tuesday’s terror attack in New York, involved contestants of Peru’s Miss Universe Pageant reciting statistics detailing violence against women in that country, rather than giving their body measurements as had been expected.

American photographer Seph Lawless in his book Autopsy of America: The Death of a Nation has documented the failed state of the shopping mall in the United States of America with a series of eerie photographs of empty decaying buildings, shattered display windows, naked mannequins and broken parking lots.

By the time this editorial appears in public we would most likely already have been in possession of the outcomes of yesterday’s meeting between the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) and President David Granger, the invitation to the Union to meet with the President coming in the wake of its call to teachers countrywide to withdraw their services to press its demand that government treat frontally with its proposals for salary increases and other benefits.

On June 2nd this year, after rejecting the second list of GECOM nominees submitted by Opposition Leader, Bharrat Jagdeo, President David Granger had this to say about the way forward.

As was pointed out in the Stabroek News editorial on Monday, the “social compact” about which President David Granger spoke so glibly prior to May 2015 has been all but forgotten.

President Trump’s decision to approach America’s opioid crisis as a “national health emergency” is a welcome departure, if only rhetorically, from his country’s decades-long attitude to illegal drugs.

Since coming into office in May 2015, the APNU+AFC administration has shown an unusual appetite for courting controversy by making decisions and taking actions that are not only unwelcomed by the political opposition, but unpopular with the masses as well.