Editorial

Pity indeed that our education system is not afforded the luxury of leaving the previous year’s difficulties behind at the start of a new academic year.

After months of contradictory statements, the PPP/C government is still to make a cogent and believable case as to why long-awaited local government elections have not been called.

While normally during the parliamentary recess in August and September there is a kind of political intermission, that is not quite the case this year.

Newsweek magazine’s recent cover story about Ebola is suggestive of larger failings in the way the spread of the disease has been covered by the international media.

Last Friday’s editorial on the Limacol Caribbean Premier League (CPL) came close to being a purist’s lament for the lost virtues of Test cricket in the region and a hankering for the halcyon days of West Indies cricket.

In an exclusive report in last Sunday’s Toronto Sun newspaper, an Emergency Room (ER) doctor revealed his angst at being forced to respect patient confidentiality while tending to a visibly drunk driver.

With a proposed date for a vote on secession from Great Britain of September 18 now almost within reach, the governing Scottish National Party (SNP) finds itself facing stiff competition from the forces opposed to the establishment of an independent Scotland.

The government has allowed a discomfiting hiatus to develop between the announcement by Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh in his budget speech last March that government was allocating one billion Guyana dollars to a coastal cleanup exercise and the actualization of the exercise.

What is clear from the eruptions over the activities of Bai Shan Lin, Vaitarna and similar logging and extractive companies, is that the PPP/C government has been engaged in drawing up agreements which either do not reflect the best interests of the nation or are not being properly enforced.

It was the late Deryck Bernard, a population geographer by profession, who a long time ago drew attention to the changing demographics of Guyana and the possible attendant political consequences.

“No one starts a war – or rather, no one in his senses ought to do so,” wrote the great Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz – “without first being clear in his mind what he intends to achieve by that war and how he intends to conduct it.”

It was a pity that this year’s Limacol Caribbean Premier League (CPL) had to come to such an unsatisfactory conclusion last Sunday.

A new World Bank study has revealed that across Latin America and the Caribbean, public school students are deprived of at least one full day of class a week and that this is a result of low teacher effectiveness.

Fresh from presiding over the resignation of her Minister of Sport at the end of last month as a furore built up around a financial scandal in his ministry, this being the twentieth dismissal or resignation of a minister since the UNC-COP coalition came into office in May of 2010, Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar has succeeded in swiftly changing the political discussion agenda in Trinidad & Tobago.

It would be an error of epic proportions if the Government of Guyana were to allow the recent discovery of what a section of the media has described as a “rudimentary submarine” in the Waini region to pass without the fullest possible disclosure, including an enlightening public discourse on the implications of the discovery for our national security.

Recent reports about the forestry industry present a significant problem for this already weakened and increasingly rudderless government.

Who would have thought Guyana had developed so far so fast?

The Guyanese who earned first-class results in this year’s Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) and Caribbean Advanced Proficiency Examination (CAPE) exams are living proof, if any were needed, that despite our periodic jeremiads about the brain drain to Everywhere Else, there is no shortage of intelligent people in this country.

The latest political controversy in Trinidad and Tobago surrounds the passage early on Tuesday morning of the Constitution (Amendment) Bill, 2014, in the lower house of Parliament.

If it seems that you’ve heard it all before when it comes to food self-sufficiency, don’t doubt yourself; you most likely have.