Editorial

Over the past few months, environmentalists, scientists and journalists have been issuing increased warnings about the decrepit floating storage and offloading facility ‘Safer’, which sits in the Red Sea off the coast of Yemen, describing it as a colossal environmental disaster waiting to happen that could devastate millions of lives.

Last Tuesday, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague in the Netherlands, handed down its decision on the Maritime Delimitation in the Indian Ocean (Somalia v.

It took ‘no time at all’ for the earliest wave of official information into the immediate-term probe of the Saturday October 2 fire that destroyed almost everything that was once the Brickdam Police Station, to be trotted out and thereafter to be quickly advanced to a point where the authorities could state, seemingly with monumental confidence, that it was a prisoner in the custody of the police who was responsible for the incineration of almost the entire complex.

Coupled with the imminent arrival in Guyana’s waters of the second Floating, Production, Storage and Offloading (FPSO) platform which is projected to extract 220,000 barrels of oil daily, the announcement by ExxonMobil that it has upped its estimate of the recoverable resource in the Stabroek Block to ten billion has triggered ululations in the halls of the government, the private sector and the select others who have begun to benefit immensely from the petroleum industry.

Over the last half century and more we have expended so much of our political energies on the issue of who should govern us, that the question of the quality of governance has received little attention.

The history of the Americas is the history of the rape of its resources, the decimation and displacement of its indigenous people, and the deliberate underdevelopment of its economies.

While Guyana at present is classified as one of the democracies of the world – although it came close to losing that status last year – it does not exhibit the full range of characteristics associated with a liberal democracy. 

“What are little girls made of? Sugar and spice and everything nice, that’s what little girls are made of…” Adults of a certain age would be familiar with this rhyme, which has been attributed to English poet Robert Southey, who died in 1843.

It’s not difficult to envision the daily routine of former US president Donald Trump when in residence at his Mar-a-Lago Club on Palm Beach Island in Florida.

There was something ‘mighty peculiar’ about the picture captioned `Firemen during the inspection’ taken (as the caption indicates) by the Ministry of Home Affairs outside its Brickdam complex, which appeared on the front page of the Stabroek News of Friday October 8, partially captioned ‘Readiness check.’

Anyone who has observed the tribulations that have gripped the sugar industry over the last decade and in particular the Skeldon estate would have seen important signs in an address on October 4th by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo.

Any visitor to these shores would come to the conclusion that fires in the city were a relatively rare occurrence, given the casual approach of the citizenry and the seeming incompetence of the Fire Service.

It was announced last week that the Indian government will provide US$7.2m in credit towards delivering solar systems to 30,000 households in the hinterland. 

Last Saturday Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s 152nd birth anniversary was observed at his statue in the Promenade Gardens.

Often when people look back at their child-hood, the memories are such that they create nostalgia and there is a longing to return to days that were carefree and full of fun, for the most part.

On 23rd September, this newspaper carried an article in which a mother related the frustration she was enduring in her attempts to secure video footage of her daughter from the Guyana Football Federation (GFF) to fulfil the request of an international scout.

On Friday October 1, the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) issued a media release in which it alluded to what it says is the “overwhelming number of infrastructure work which is being handled by foreign-owned companies” against the backdrop of “several complaints from its membership of cases in which they are being bypassed for work in favour of the aforementioned foreign-owned companies.”

Saturday’s catastrophic fire at the Brickdam Police Station laid bare yet again the failings of the government in the security sector and particularly the bumbling and ineffectual conduct of the Guyana Fire Service (GFS).

Georgetown was once a rather unique capital in the region, not just because it was a garden city, with trees lining the avenues, grassy parapets and so many houses with ample yard space accommodating tropical flora, but also because of its wooden, colonial-period architecture.

As stated in yesterday’s editorial, any local content emphasis should primarily be on jobs and the transfer of skills from expatriate workers to local employees over a well-defined period to create a cohort of highly skilled Guyanese that can begin to take ownership of the industry.