Editorial

With its mind firmly fixed on both the domestic and international dimensions of the manner in which it attends to the welfare of the country’s indigenous communities, the Government of Guyana has sculpted a public information space on which it dishes out a fairly constant stream of missives about its treatment of Amerindian communities.

Given that we are in the year 2024, nearly five years into oil production and with an average annual input into the budget from petroleum revenues of U$1b – $200b – there is surely unanimous agreement that pit latrines at schools should be a thing of the past.

In the perception of the ruling party there is no heterogeneity or variety in the local world in which they function; whatever external appearances might suggest everyone and every organisation within our 83,000 square miles is political in character.

Whatever the outcome of the internal rumblings in the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU), the three-year pact sealed with the government on Wednesday is a victory for constitutionally-enshrined collective bargaining and trade unionism is alive.

Normally when a union signs a pay deal with an employer the assumption is that the members of its executive all endorse the agreement.

On Monday, toshaos from around the country gathered at the Arthur Chung Conference Centre, Liliendaal for the National Toshaos Council (NTC) Conference 2024, which ends tomorrow.

Last Sunday evening, the announcement of Dave Martins’ passing at home in Guyana spread across the modern day ‘Guyanese grapevine’ like a forest fire raging out of control.

There has probably never been a time in contemporary Guyana when either the state or the municipal authorities have not sought to ‘sell’ the populace some flimsy excuse for their failure to ‘deliver’ in one or another critical area of their responsibilities associated with the creation of an enhanced quality of service.

It must be considered a national scandal that on two separate occasions soldiers of the Guyana Defence Force (GDF) have allegedly been caught red-handed ferrying large amounts of marijuana.

In his address at the opening of the recent Building Expo President Irfaan Ali extolled Silica City on the highway, which he called his “masterpiece.”  

In an August 11th letter brimful of nostalgia and social history, Claudius Prince outlined elements of the self-help housing scheme which had been pioneered under the Forbes Burnham administration in the 1970s and 80s and which resulted in several well-developed settlements.

Guyana and Georgetown in particular seem to be slowly sinking beneath a mountain of rubbish. 

The Games of the XXXIII Olympiad (the 2024 Summer Olympics) in Paris officially ended on Sunday last and athletes, for the most part, can take a breather, celebrate having won medals, or simply having given of their best.

“Take warning, You better take warning, Take warning, You better do good…” Opening stanza from 1971 hit by Guyanese singer Eddie Hooper   In the July 2024 edition of her Caribbean Monthly Economic Report, Trinidad and Toba-go (T&T) Economist Marla Dukharan observed, “ … for the past 12 years (2011-2023), over US$25 billion has gone missing from our country.

Across political administrations in Guyana there have been persistent concerns about the physical conditions that obtain at our municipal markets which, to say the least, have from way back, been downright deplorable.

In a statement on August 7th, the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM) responded to a news item in the August 3rd edition of Stabroek News in which the Alliance For Change  (AFC) sought updates on an improved electoral system.

The week before last the Ministry of Natural Resources issued a press release on mining. 

In a letter to this newspaper on August 4th in response to the Stabroek News Editorial of August 2nd titled `The AG and the Judiciary’, Attorney General, Anil Nandlall SC made reference to the PPP/C’s record on free expression and lobbed various criticisms at this newspaper which should not go unanswered.

We are no strangers to riots in this country, but London apart, where street violence in the central areas particularly is anything but unknown, it is not a common occurrence in England as a whole.

Notwithstanding all of the efforts made to date and the progress achieved, and even if there were to be some miraculous advancement today, the world will not achieve gender parity for another 134 years.