Editorial

This week’s 25th Inter-Sessional Meeting of Caricom Heads of Government has been preceded by much commentary on the extent to which the community has been particularly timely in meeting the agenda which it has set for itself since the 1989 Grande Anse Declaration and the formal establishment of the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME).

The tumultuous events currently unfolding in the Middle East continue to dominate the reportage of the major news providers around the globe.

At his most recent press conference, President Jagdeo sought to disarm critics of his One Laptop Per Family (OLPF) initiative by resorting to the most disingenuous of arguments to wit that they wanted to deprive poor children of the opportunity to learn.

Guyana is a secular state. It has to be, because this is a multi-faith society whose constitution guarantees freedom of worship for all religions and where the state cannot be seen to be favouring any one of them.

The British Prime Minister’s recent comments on the failure of “state multiculturalism” and his call for “muscular liberalism,” have revived debates about assimilation and minority rights that extend at least as far back as the 1988 ban on Salman Rushdie’s novel The Satanic Verses.

All across Caricom, within the physical confines of its geopolitical space and beyond, in the diaspora and the broader sphere of cyberspace, tough, painful questions are being asked of those charged with the region’s collective welfare.

On Monday, a nine-year-old boy was found dead on his parents’ poultry farm in a remote Berbice village.

An account of the collapse of the Soviet Union relates that, “In December 1991, as the world watched in amazement, the Soviet Union disintegrated into fifteen countries.”

Last Thursday morning sections of Georgetown were submerged beneath the steady downpour of the previous night and into the following morning. 

It has become a recurring theme in these columns for the poor conditions of schools throughout the country to be highlighted in the expectation that urgent action would be taken.

A close-up of Hosni Mubarak shown on the CNN website revealed an utterly cynical face.

As creeping democratization takes hold in the Middle East, some curious Westerners  have combed through the region’s literature for clues to the turbulence.

Two eminent Guyanese economists, Dr Havelock Brewster and Prof Clive Thomas, are perhaps most famous in integrationist circles for their seminal 1967 work, The Dynamics of West Indian Economic Integration, the centrepiece of a series on regional economic integration put out by the University of the West Indies.

Just over a week ago, totally in keeping with the intemperate behaviour that has come to characterise this current administration, Health Minister Dr Leslie Ramsammy chose a public forum to angrily inform the representatives of international organizations based here that they had used wrong data which was not tabulated locally, and which “disrespected” the country and undermined the efforts of local health workers.

In recent weeks discussion has again arisen on the question, ‘Shall we have a CCJ or not?’

Parent protests over infrastructural deficiencies, health hazards and physically dangerous conditions in state schools – the latest of which occurred at the Philadelphia Primary School just last week – have become a common occurrence.

While to err is human, Minister Webster’s parliamentary howler in pricing the netbooks for the government’s one laptop per family (OLPF) programme betrays something else more fundamental.

Proceedings in our House of Assembly are usually fairly turgid, except when they are enlivened by the occasional witticism, such as when Minister Kellawan Lall rose to his feet to speak on Monday, and Ms Debbie Backer called out to her fellow parliamentarians, “Duck!”

About eight months ago, shortly before the general elections in the UK, The Independent, a daily newspaper in England relaunched with a new design and a banner at the top its front page which proclaims: “Free from party political bias / Free from Proprietorial Influence.”

Even as more and more people eschew the radio for the visual immediacy of television and the interactive, multimedia experience of the Internet, Tuesday, February 1, 2011 was quite an interesting day to be listening to the BBC World Service.