Editorial

Three weeks after the fire at the Mahdia Secondary School dormitory that claimed the lives of 20 children and left many others injured and traumatised the government is still to announce the anticipated inquiry into the tragedy.

Tomorrow Guyana goes to the polls for Local Government Elections.  In numerical terms the PPP/C always does better in these than does the opposition simply because there are 70 Neighbourhood Democratic Councils and ten municipalities, albeit of varying sizes and consequently with varying numbers of council representatives.

There have been in the past decade numerous fires and deaths of hinterland students including three boys from the Aishalton Secondary School or that of a girl who drowned in a pit latrine at Santa Rosa Primary along with several fires at schools since 2020.

Quite apart from the human dimensions of what happened at Mahdia, the tragedy brought home with a vengeance structural problems in relation to the regional system of governance in this country.

The eye-opening assessment of all 24 school dormitories in Guyana, which was commissioned by the Ministry of Education and funded by UNICEF in partnership with the Canadian High Commission underscores a deeper disquieting issue that has long been of concern – the lack of equitability of rights afforded to citizens.

It’s that time of year again in the Caribbean. Carnival season is long done, it’s hurricane season and the cricket bacchanal is in full swing.

Recurring controversy over Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC), examination paper leaks ought not to be the kind of challenge that we should be confronted with at this time, not when technology has placed at our disposal resources that would render cheating at that level more difficult to perpetrate and when, moreover,  Caribbean nations ought, collectively, to be setting their faces against such practices rather than, individually, furiously seeking exoneration whenever irregularities in the distribution of examination papers occur.

A week from today, voters will elect new councils across the country.

So now that Smallie and his immediate accomplices are dead then that is the end of the story.

This is not the country we grew up in. It was disheartening to see that after a perfunctory three days of mourning for the Mahdia students, the bread and circus show resumed.

President Irfaan Ali found himself at the Itamaraty Palace in Brazil on Tuesday to attend a meeting of South American leaders at the instigation of President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva.

Very few, if any, Guyanese will ever forget the Mahdia fire tragedy and its ongoing ramifications.

The masquerade ball, which dates back to medieval times, has always been an essential symbol of the upper class of society.

The National Archives – if they have, in the twenty first century, now been afforded a higher level of official mindfulness than had been the case more than two decades ago – would probably contain quite a few GIS (Government Infor-mation Services) publications lionizing ‘our Amerindians,’ saluting them as ‘our first people’ and setting down various envisaged undertakings designed to lift them from the children of the forest nomenclature that sought to describe the traditional manner of their existence.

While there is much more to be done to respond to the trauma and grief that have enveloped the families of the 19 children who perished in the fire at Mahdia two Sundays ago, equally important is the establishment of accountability for what happened.

Smallie, as he is known, was probably the most dangerous inmate in the Guyana prison system.

“That’s life, that’s what all the people say. You’re riding high in April, Shot down in May” Frank Sinatra even got the months right in his 1966 version of the classic ballad “That’s Life.”

Today is Independence Day.  This year it hardly represents an occasion for celebration, and the government was right to convert the planned festivities in Lethem to a night of remembrance and prayer for the children who died at Mahdia.

Ernst Mach, the 19th century Austrian physicist and philosopher, had observed that thought experiments are a structured display of our natural curiosity about the world.

Sunday night’s fire which razed the girls’ dormitory at the Mahdia Secondary School, taking 19 lives, leaving several injured, traumatising dozens, and spreading a streak of grief and pain across Karisparu, El Paso, Micobie and Chenapau, as well as all over this country was, from all accounts, a disaster waiting to happen.