Editorial

President Jagdeo’s broadside earlier this month against the Alliance For Change (AFC) in which he alleged among other things that the party was financed by someone who was involved in the export of cocaine with pepper sauce on the side reminds one of the old adage that the best form of defence is attack.

The authorities are fortunate that we don’t have any satirical news programmes here like they do in the United States, although the events of last week in Guyana might have been too overwhelming even for a redoubtable humourist like Jon Stewart.

Fed up with the routine condescension shown to the man in the street by reporters on the business channel CNBC, the comedian Jon Stewart recently aired an eight minute compilation of the station’s most famous and notoriously well-paid analysts making asses of themselves.

Let’s face it: the excitement and tension of the final session of the Fifth Test Match at the Queen’s Park Oval on Tuesday, which saw the West Indies denying England a series-levelling victory, could in no way have equalled the thrill we would have experienced had the West Indies actually won the game.

There have been no official pronouncements that would suggest there is at present or could be in the future an issue with development aid in the current financial crisis.

The World Bank recently announced that the world economy as a whole will shrink for the first time since World War II, meaning  for the first time since the end of the Great Depression that afflicted the globe in the 1930s.

The weekend before the last, the security forces seized 17 kg of cocaine on a farm at Ridge, the southernmost section of Wakenaam Island.

In last Monday’s editorial entitled ‘Clico and the failure of leadership’ we dealt with the actions taken by the President, the Minister of Finance and the Commissioner of Insurance in relation to the crisis that has engulfed the local Clico subsidiary.

One might have thought that the annual ceremony at Babu John to commemorate the 12th death anniversary of President Cheddi Jagan would have been a time for sentiment, gentle reminiscing and inspirational addresses.

The latest edition of the New Yorker magazine has a cartoon for the ages.

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude.

The global financial crisis, the global economic slowdown/downturn; it has many names.

It has not been long since the European Union leadership, in spite of the difficulties of getting ratification on a formal constitution and a revised treaty formalizing its status of political union, felt able to congratulate itself on the strides made since its foundation.

After eight days of debates and detailed line-by-line scrutiny of the budget, the National Assembly approved the Appropriation Bill last week.

On January 30, the day Trinidad was rocked by the news that the government would in effect be bailing out C L Financial – or CLICO – as it is branded in the region, a terse statement was issued in Georgetown by the Chief Executive Officer of its operations here, Ms Geeta Singh-Knight to the effect that Clico (Guyana) was “solid” and that none of its assets were intertwined with the troubled Clico (Trinidad) or Clico Investment Bank and that developments involving the parent company had no financial impact on it.

So the global financial turmoil has finally reached these shores. If the government really believed all those reassuring words they have been plying us with all this time, they should now be in a state of total shock.

There is a perception in Guyana, the United States Department of State 2008 Human Rights Report released on Wednesday said, that some police officers and magistrates could be bribed to make cases of domestic violence, child rape and criminal child abuse “go away.”

A couple of weeks ago, in noting that former Foreign Ministers Sir Shridath Ramphal and Rashleigh Jackson had turned 80, we waxed a little nostalgic about the brain power they had at their disposal, the likes of which the foreign service, if not Guyana, appears to have lost.

A few days ago, Slumdog Millionaire, a low-budget Bollywood-meets-Hollywood fable, won eight Oscars this year and turned a clutch of unknown actors into international celebrities.

President Hugo Chavez has won the February 15 referendum on term limits with a comfortable 55% victory.