Editorial

Kamla Persad-Bissessar’s landslide victory over Basdeo Panday for the leadership of Trinidad and Tobago’s main opposition party, the United National Congress (UNC), has sent journalists, observers and citizens into a frenzy of superlatives and hype that is typically Trinidadian.

Early Monday morning, Ms Alexis Felix a 30-year-old mother of three, picked up her youngest child – a three-week-old boy – walked to a nearby canal and threw him in.

As we reported in this paper on Monday, Ms Kamla Persad-Bissessar won a decisive victory over longstanding Leader of the UNC Basdeo Panday in the party’s leadership elections.

Commissioner of Police Henry Greene lamented publicly that the Guyana Police Force had “bad eggs.”

With each passing week, the Jagdeo administration continues to lower the bar as it relates to ethics in government business and standards in public life.

It was the Guyana Times which last Saturday informed the nation that the Government of Guyana had sought the removal of Dr Janette Bulkan from the World Bank’s Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility, where she had responsibility for reviewing Suriname’s Readiness Planning Preparation (RPP).

Responding to a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China,” Google recently warned that it had begun to “review the feasibility” of its business dealings with China.

Last Sunday, as most of us were consumed by events following the deadly earthquake in Haiti in the northern Caribbean, a seismic political shift was also taking place, almost unnoticed, in the deep south of the continent.

The first one was days before Christmas 2009. Thaddius Samuels, a four-year-old described as chatty and energetic, died in a septic tank on December 21 last year.

Below the surface of the rough and tumble of day-to-day international politics and economic relations, the traditional major powers have begun to take notice of a new economic development phenomenon, namely, the rise of a group of countries which a Western observer has christened “the BRICS.” 

Had 42 persons, including 18 children, been slaughtered by bandits in a criminal massacre, there would most likely have been demands for inquiries from civil society, howls of outrage from the joint opposition parties and prayers for the departed from the religious community.

There is nothing like a disaster of the enormity of the one that engulfed Haiti on Tuesday to drive home harsh realities that we would rather not accept.

It was President Nicolas Sarkozy of France who exhorted the international community this time around to work finally to lift what he called Haiti’s “curse.”

The scale of the human tragedy in Haiti is beyond imagining.

The Eighth Report to the US Congress on the operation of the Caribbean Basin Economic Recovery Act prepared by the Office of the United States Trade Representative has, briefly, but rather pointedly, drawn attention to the protracted delinquency of the Government of Guyana in the matter of creating an adequate legal framework for the protection of intellectual property.

The magnitude 7 earthquake that devastated the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Tuesday evening has prompted many to ask how much more can Haiti and her long-suffering people endure.

The general consensus is that there is need for change. Regardless of political affiliation, religious persuasion or social standing Guyanese are united in their conviction that there must be a shift in the status quo; time for an upgrade, if you will, since the present programme has all but crashed.

The political tensions arising in Washington over the arrest of a Nigerian accused of having been trained and directed by al Qaeda from Yemen, to detonate a bomb on an American aircraft, suggest the continuing influence of the 9/11 New York bombing on United States foreign policy decision-making.

It is high time that the Guyana Police Force acknowledges the fact that there is a serious problem of corruption within its ranks.

Imagine being told one day that pursuing your long-established livelihood now required six months notice to the state before a decision could even be made whether you were still allowed to do this.