Public Health Minister Dr George Norton’s pronouncement last week about an intended clampdown on the sale of ‘irregularly’ packaged and unlabelled goods is not the first declaration of its kind by government in recent years.
What has been revealed in the forensic examination of state broadcaster, NCN will raise again the question of what the APNU+AFC government and the respective boards are doing in relation to the published reports on the series of audits which were commissioned last year and which have revealed a host of wrongdoings, transgressions and poor practices.
There must be many streets in Georgetown in need of attention, and a huge number in rural and interior areas.
It is hard to recall the last time a senior political figure spoke to the press with the candour shown by Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi in Ottawa earlier this week.
In an online comment on a letter to this newspaper (‘Lost opportunities at the flag-raising ceremony’, May 28, 2016), which related some of the security shortcomings of the event and the boorish, violent behaviour of one section of the crowd towards a group of young Americans, Dave Martins notes, “We have become cantankerous and hostile, and both visitors and residents encounter those attitudes… Those behaviours are now ingrained, and even accepted as the norm.”
Last Friday night, 16-year-old Onika Luke was carrying out her duties as a waitress at a Chinese restaurant at Better Hope, East Coast Demerara when she was shot in the chin by a lone gunman who apparently attempted to rob the restaurant.
In the course of the month of May the Caricom region has been up for scrutiny either by governments or government officials, or by individual commentators and practitioners, and their perspectives have varied over the field from relative optimism to some degree of pessimism.
What this newspaper has already said was a considerable measure of incompetence and ineptitude that attended aspects of the protocol and logistics that were in evidence at the Jubilee Flag-Raising Ceremony ought to be responded to by the Government of Guyana in a far more fulsome manner than was afforded by the quixotic content of the statement issued by Junior Minister Nicolette Henry, and which, justifiably, has come in for a fair measure of further public flak.
Now that the 50th independence anniversary celebrations have ended the APNU+AFC government must begin delivering.
If the flag-raising ceremony of May 26, 1966, went off smoothly, the same could not be said for Jubilee night fifty years later.
After such dispiriting campaigns for the Democratic and Republican nominations, President Obama’s judicious speech at the Hiroshima memorial is a bracing reminder of what can be achieved when political rhetoric is used with intelligence and empathy.
No serious observer of the Venezuelan crisis could believe that President Nicolás Maduro’s recent, hastily planned trip to Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago had anything to do with simply reaffirming his government’s commitment to the PetroCaribe arrangement and improving trade relations and cooperation in the areas of energy and security, as per the official communiqués.
Independence was born in circumstances of discord, and fifty years on the nation is still imprisoned in the straitjacket of that past.
With the end of the country’s five-year parliamentary term formally due towards the end of November 2016, St Lucia’s Prime Minister Kenny Anthony took the occasion of a recent Budget address and debate, still to be concluded, to announce the dissolution of the country’s Parliament and the holding of general elections on June 6, thus leaving the conclusion of Budget proceedings to be undertaken either by his St Lucia Labour Party (SLP) or the current Opposition United Workers Party (UWP).
In the fullness of time one expects that the recently completed Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Public Service of Guyana will become the subject of vigorous public discourse and that such discourse will take account of, among other things, which of its recommendations are accepted by the President and the manner and speed with which those accepted recommendations are implemented.
While the release of the forensic audits into a clutch of state agencies and related bodies is revealing quite a lot about poor governance and dodgy financial practices under the PPP/C administration it is also presenting questions about the modus operandi of the APNU+AFC government.
Last week all the talk in the region was about refugees, although not the Syrians, it must be noted, but Venezuelans ‒ possibly.
Who can doubt the truth of Prime Minister David Cameron’s apparently unguarded remarks to the Queen and the Archbishop of Canterbury on the eve of London’s anti-corruption summit?
With less than a week to go for the commemoration of our 50th anniversary of Independence, there are a few home truths that we would do well to remember.
News this week that a raid—the second one publicized for the year so far—at the Georgetown Prison had unearthed a significant amount of contraband brings an unsettling feeling that despite protestations to the contrary, things are perhaps too fluid at Lot 12 Camp Street.