Editorial

During the turbulent sixties, the PPP often accused the private media and in particular the Chronicle of inflammatory reporting intended to provoke strife and mayhem.

Last Tuesday the political parties submitted their lists of candidates to Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield.

In recent years there has been no shortage of embarrassment within the higher reaches of American journalism as stories reported as fact, or original opinion, have been retracted after they turned out to be speculative – Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction – plagiarized, or complete fictions, as was the case with more than one writer at The New Republic and with Jayson Blair at The New York Times.

Whichever government is elected by the people of Guyana on May 11, it will undoubtedly face a huge challenge in working towards national reconciliation and tackling burning issues such as crime and corruption.

Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka once said that “The Nigerian people have always approached democracy and the elites have always turned them back.”

It would be hard to dispute that perhaps more than any other region of the world, the Middle East finds itself in a degree of turbulence that is now dominating the attention of the major Western powers, as well as affecting other countries, large and small.

A recent report from the Teaching Service Commission (TSC) paints a pretty disparaging picture of aspects of the country’s education system particularly as this relates to discipline amongst teachers, including some head teachers.

With nomination day looming tomorrow, the average voter has thus far been dealt an uninspiring and deficient hand by the main contestants.

In our Friday edition we carried a photo of two inmates of the Camp Street prison, one of whom was armed with a cutlass, about to attack a third in his cell.

The recent descent into vulgarity in the Trinidad and Tobago House of Representatives, with a minister of the People’s Partnership Government using the cloak of parliamentary privilege to cast the vilest of aspersions on opposition leader Dr Keith Rowley’s parentage and supposed attitude to women, represents a new low in Caribbean, Westminster-style political debates.

A report published in Monday’s edition of this newspaper which revealed that a 14-year-old girl, who was allegedly prostituted by her mother, had been sent to the New Opportunity Corps (NOC) for two years has drawn outrage from child rights advocates and rightly so.

As the statutory date for general elections draws near, the last election having been held in May of 2010, the political climate in Trinidad & Tobago seems to be heating up.

It would not have escaped the attention of careful observers that President Donald Ramotar’s promise of a highly educated work force, made to investors at last Thursday’s ceremony to mark the opening of Qualfon’s East Bank operations, came a matter of weeks before his government seeks to be returned to office at the May 11 general elections.

On March 10, political activist Courtney Crum-Ewing was gunned down in the Diamond Housing Scheme as he used a bullhorn to urge people to vote against the ruling party at the upcoming elections.

Nomination Day is on April 7, and according to what has been said by both acting Town Clerk Carol Sooba and Chief Election Officer Keith Lowenfield, it will be held at the traditional venue, namely, City Hall.

A recent article in Le Monde reports on growing scepticism within the medical community as to the value of using mice to test drugs that will later be used on humans.

Following on from last Friday’s editorial focus on corruption in Latin America, we believe that it would be clear to most people that, although many things have changed for the better in Latin America in the last few decades, profound problems of democracy and governance remain.

“Do you remember the days of slavery?” Jamaican Roots Reggae artist Burning Spear asks in his 1975 song ‘Slavery Days’.

The death of Lee Kuan Yew, former long-serving Prime Minister of Singapore, is of significance for the Caribbean if only for the reason that he first attained office at about the same time as many of the original democratically elected leaders of the countries of this Region, constituted largely of very small states, also commenced their periods of governance.

Those of us in the Caribbean who sat through the early hours of Saturday morning to watch the last of the four quarter finals in this year’s Cricket World Cup Tournament knew only too well that the outcome that we wanted, had hoped for, could come only through some miracle or else on the back of a West Indies performance on the field that rose head and shoulders above the mediocrity which had characterized the team’s ungainly entry into the quarter finals stage of the competition.