Editorial

“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present?”

A couple of weeks ago, Ian McDonald penned a heartfelt tribute to a dearly departed friend and colleague from the world of sugar.

Zimeena Rasheed’s feat of securing 20 passes at the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) examinations (18 Grade Ones and two Grade Twos), which was announced on Tuesday was astounding to say the least.

It is little over fifty years since a sustained campaign, led by the then opposition Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) under Alexander Bustamante, resulted in a referendum decision approving the country’s withdrawal from the West Indies Federation, and supporting national independence for Jamaica.

Once US President Barack Obama had announced that the planned September one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin had been removed from his itinerary, the announcement was bound to become the subject of immediate and intense interest among foreign policy analysts, keen to contemplate the implications of the announcement for longer-term relations between Washington and Moscow.

While it may appear to be a minor point, the way in which the ruling PPP treated reporters at the opening of its 30th Congress in Port Mourant two Fridays ago is reflective of some of its inner traumas: paranoia, the need for absolute control of information, distrust of the media and orchestration of events.

“A week is a long time in politics,” British Prime Minister Harold Wilson famously said, and there can be nowhere in the political universe where that remark was more applicable than in Guyana recently.

In 1960, according to official census data, Detroit was the most prosperous city in America.

Ever since Jack Warner’s victory in the Chaguanas West by-election in Trinidad on July 29, there has been a lot of excited comment in the twin-island republic about a “paradigm shift” in the politics of the country.

“I shout to mi sister that mi come home fi meet mi death.”

The Iranian Ayatollah Khamenei obviously decided well in advance of the impending conclusion of the rule of President Ahmadinejad’s period of two four-year terms, that a change of strategy was needed by Iran in the context of rapidly changing international and regional circumstances which were having their own effect on his country.

The two-month interregnum between the conclusion of one school year and the beginning of another usually finds the education sector trying to effect repairs and renovation to defective schoolhouses so that at the start of the new academic year we would at least have upgraded, however modestly, the quality of those spaces in which the state delivers education.

For a government that has never been shy of railroading laws and big-ticket projects through Parliament and other places, it was passing strange that in recent months the Ramotar administration seemed more solicitous of the opposition’s views on a clutch of important issues.

In January of this year Mayor Hamilton Green convened a meeting to explore approaches to saving City Hall, which is in a critical state. 

Yet again Edward Snowden’s predicament – his asylum-seeking and the penalties he will likely face at the hands of the US prosecutors ‒ is back in the news.

Jack Warner may have convincingly won the Chaguanas West by-election in Trinidad on Monday but there are arguably more losers than winners after this particularly nasty and game-changing political battle.

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery. None but ourselves can free our minds…” Bob Marley (Redemption Song – 1980) One hundred and seventy-five years ago African slaves who had been brought to this part of the world were freed ‒ some four years after the Slavery Abolition Act was passed ‒ from that abominable condition which effectively dehumanized both the masters and the enslaved.

Unfolding events in Egypt since the removal of President Mohammed Morsi from office have provided a textbook example of the central role which the military plays in the political affairs of states, even in some of those countries which possess a façade of democracy.

It is undoubtedly the case that the essential structures of authoritarian rule, using the army as a critical instrument of stabilization, were constructed by Gamal Abdel Nasser, in his long period of domination following the military’s abolition of the Egyptian monarchy in 1952, and his takeover of the presidency of the country from General Naguib in 1956.

If Thursday’s meeting of stakeholders on the Amaila Falls Hydropower Project (AFHP) was government’s way of energizing Article 13 of the Constitution which mandates the involvement of the people in the decisions of the country, particularly those that directly affect their well-being, then it was a masterstroke and indicates changed thinking by the Office of the President and by extension, Freedom House.