Editorial

Minister of Home Affairs Clement Rohee recently told this newspaper that he had identified a connection between the escape of inmates from the Mazaruni Prison and a similar escape from the Lusignan Prison in 1999.

Religious and political protestors last week must have been so consumed by the controversy over the coming of casino gambling and by complaints about the confusing introduction of the value added tax that few found of them time to contemplate the worsening plight of this country’s girl children.

Considering the indecent haste with which it was bundled through Parliament, the Gambling Prevention (Amendment) Act will leave critics shaking their heads in collective disbelief that the government has been so inconsiderate of well-founded concerns.

In our Sunday edition last week we carried a report on the appointment of former Region 3 Chairman Esau Dookie as headmaster of Saraswat Primary School.

In her novel Dangerous to Know, English-born best selling writer Barbara Taylor Bradford describes a sixteenth century matriarch who had stipulated that her huge house should always be passed down to a female inheritor.

No one who is familiar with the faltering academic standards and squalid physical conditions at the University of Guyana’s central Turkeyen campus should have been surprised at the desperate tone of Vice-Chancellor Dr James Rose’s address to the 40th convocation congregation.

Does the President need a national security adviser to analyse the abundant amount of raw information that passes through his office and to coordinate the myriad security agencies and programmes in the country?

The moral protest by local religious organizations over the official introduction of casino gambling in Guyana has obscured a disturbing feature of this development.

Two revealing meetings were held over the last two weeks in relation to local government at which the subject minister Mr Kellawan Lall presided.

The unanimity of the various faiths on the subject of casino gambling has clearly taken the government off guard.

Racial slurs targeted at famous Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on the popular Channel 4 television show in Britain, Celebrity Big Brother, have been around the world and back and the issue has since taken on international proportions.

A 2004 report, which criticised aspects of the Louis Berger feasibility study done on the Berbice bridge, has been ignored and government is moving to build the bridge using the Berger recommendations.

The recent controversy concerning the President’s appointment of ministers of the new Cabinet before they were declared elected as members of parliament has given rise to considerable speculation.

The world grew a little colder, and larger, last July when the BBC revealed that “‘six degrees of separation’ may be the academic equivalent of an urban myth.”

More of a quaint, 19th century, Victorian heritage site than a national maximum security penitentiary, the Mazaruni Prison has once again become the scene of an escape of some of its desperate inmates.

Friday afternoon’s escape of nine inmates from the Mazaruni penal facility and the shooting of four members of the joint services is just another manifestation of the precarious state of the nation’s security.

Partly owing to the contretemps over the Gambling Prevention (Amendment) Bill which seeks to legalize casinos, the Health Facilities Licensing Bill perhaps did not receive quite the same degree of publicity last week which it otherwise might have done.

Last year, the Amerindian People’s Association attempted to have the National Assembly alter the title of the Amerindian Act by using the term ‘Indigenous’ rather than ‘Amerindian.’

Nobody yet knows how fast information will travel in the twenty-first century.

Last Sunday, we commented on President Hugo Ch