Editorial

This newspaper has published innumerable reports on safety, or rather the lack of it, at local worksites, more particularly in the construction sector.

The conclusion of the Seventh Congress of the Cuban Communist party last week gave an indication of the tendencies towards both change, and resistance to it, at the highest level of decision-making on the country’s future course.

Probably the most quizzical piece of reportage on last Friday’s event to mark the first public consultation for the Commission of Inquiry into the education system in Guyana had to do with the disclosure regarding the paucity of attendance at the event.

In the last edition of the ‘Public Interest’ television programme, President Granger continued his efforts to tamp down the public consternation over the conduct of Minister of State, Joseph Harmon in relation to his interference with the Guyana Revenue Authority and his subsequent furtive and still-to-be fully explained trip to China.

State-owned media in a country such as this will always be problematic.

A recent, eye-opening New York Times Op-Ed considers the enormous costs of mass incarceration in America.

The death, aged 97, of Patricio Aylwin, the first Chilean president to be democratically elected after almost 17 years of dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, may resonate with some Guyanese because of a few traits Mr Aylwin shared with the late Dr Cheddi Jagan.

On Tuesday, a jury found Mr Kevin Rankin not guilty of sodomising and murdering his two-year-old niece nearly three years ago at Haslington, East Coast Demerara.

Undoubtedly, citizens of countries all over the world with access to television must be increasingly fascinated by the ongoing process of selecting candidates from within the Democratic and Republican parties now seeking to be chosen as representatives of those parties for the presidency of the country in the election in November this year.

It appears that after several years there has been some meaningful movement in the matter of the much wished-for negotiations in the matter of wages and salaries increases for Public Servants.

It is hard to imagine that one official of an 11-month-old government could have gotten himself into so much trouble on so many fronts.

As more emerges about Minister of State Joseph Harmon, his trip to China and his appointment of Mr Brian Tiwarie as an “Honorary Ministerial Advisor” the murkier everything becomes.

In 1994 the Rwandan genocide set in motion a chain of events that culminated in a decade-long regional war that cost five million lives.

It does not appear to be a good time to be a leader in Latin America or, for that matter, the Caribbean.

There is a housing crisis in Guyana. This is obvious even from a cursory look around, which would reveal families squatting in one-room shacks on government reserves in areas like Plastic City.

With American presidential elections due in November this year, the preliminary stages of candidates facing what are described as primary elections within their own parties, are beginning to come to a climax, as the various pretenders to the throne are winnowed out, or voluntarily leave the race.

It would have been naïve, to say the least, to expect that with the very best of intentions the APNU+AFC administration would not have – sooner or later – begun to encounter its very own political banana skins and that those would not have given rise to the need for the coalition to confront those attendant challenges.

It has taken just 11 months for the APNU+AFC administration to stumble badly on accountability and good governance and, importantly, in relation to two of its senior officials: the Minister of State, Joseph Harmon and the Minister of Social Protection, Volda Lawrence.

It was former Head of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary, Dr Roger Luncheon who transformed his post into one of considerable power.

After almost a year of poring over the 11.5 million documents which constitute the Panama Papers — the largest leak of sensitive data in history — news outlets around the world are confirming many of our worst fears about the global network of offshore tax havens.