Editorial

Last Tuesday, in observance of  World Food Safety Day, the World Health Organisation (WHO) sought to expand attention to the deleterious effects of foodborne diseases under the theme ‘Safer food, better health’.

Over the past three decades, the oscillating spheres of professional sport and entertainment were being spun in a continuously accelerating centrifuge to mesmerise fans and viewers for the promotion and selling of a vast array of commercial products.

What the recent incidents at the Lodge and Campbellville secondary schools appear to be telling us is that parts of our school system may well be in a condition of ‘siege.’

For months, the Ali administration has prevaricated on approving the National Minimum Wage (NMW) at $60,000 per month from the current figure of $44,400 as recommended by the Ministry of Labour’s Tripartite Committee in January this year.

“Our approach in this Government is to take our country forward in keeping with the Constitutional requirement and we will not have those requirements held up, or held hostage by political object,” said President Ali at the end of May.

It is quite the double-edged sword Guyana is facing. The surging price of Brent Crude in recent weeks means far greater top down revenues to the state’s coffers from its share of profit oil and royalties, but it also means higher prices at the pumps and for consumer goods.

The PPP has never reconciled itself to the fact that Georgetown, the capital city, is under the control of the PNC now APNU with the AFC in tow.

Starting last year, the government has made various announcements of one-time cash grants to diverse groups for a variety of reasons, these were in addition to the contentious and inadequate one-off $25,000 distributed to each household that was meant to supplement lost earnings as a response to the economic deprivation wrought by the COVID-19 restrictions.

During the 1980s, Compton Davis, a Guyanese, moved to the UK to complete his architectural studies.

By the time this editorial circulates, those member countries of the Organization of American States (OAS) who were represented in Los Angeles at the IXth Summit of the Americas would have been close to winding up the discourses and deliberations.

On May 31st, 2022, the government finally composed the board of the Integrity Commission and Chandra Gajraj was sworn in as the Chair.

Politicians seem to exist in a world of their own invention that bears little correspondence to the reality which confronts ordinary citizens.

Wanting order in one’s life is a universal human desire. No normal person wants chaos.

The Summit of the Americas will open on Monday promoting the theme ‘Building a Sustainable, Resilient, and Equitable Future’.

In his keynote address at the Barbados Agrofest last week, President Irfaan Ali made a grand gesture toward Caribbean food security, when he announced that young Barbadians would be allocated farmland in Guyana; 50 acres to be precise.

Drivers who have been commuting to and from Georgetown during rush-hour traffic over the last five years can attest to the worsening nightmare they are confronted with on a daily basis with no apparent end in sight.

President Irfaan Ali’s tenure as Guyana’s Ninth Executive President   began with what was widely felt to be his insufficient experience in ‘frontline’ politics to come even close to being able to hit the ground running, insofar as meeting all of the requirements necessary to allow for the proficient steering of the ship of state.

Thursday’s unspeakable fire tragedy that befell Tracy Flu and claimed the lives of three of her children: 8-year-old Timothy Kippins, 6-year-old Triston Kippins and one-year-old Zhalia Flue, should serve as a signpost that there are deep pockets of poverty, cleavages, contradictions and failures of governance in all parts of society.

President Irfaan Ali gave his Independence Day address in Essequibo this year, and appropriately enough selected Guyana’s border with Venezuela as one of his topics.

The chestnut colt was third from last at the half mile mark.