Editorial

It was on Wednesday that President David Granger told the senior officers of the Guyana Police Force that “Guyanese desire a Force which they can trust,” It was incumbent on the organisation, he said, to ensure that their roles and responsibilities were clearly understood and that every effort was being made to fulfil them.

In what can only be termed the height of idiocy, not one but two bodies representing miners in Guyana included in a manifesto published publicly as an advertisement on Sunday, an argument against the phasing out of the use of mercury in local artisanal mining “without a viable, proven replacement”.

It’s that time of the year again. Sports reviews of the year are prepared, lists of outstanding achievements are compiled, and awards are handed out to the leading performers of the year.

Last Sunday may well have offered a seminal moment in the contemporary history of our formal education system.

The belated issuance yesterday by the Department of Energy (DE) of the explanation for the method of its proposed sale of the first three lifts of Guyana’s oil does not dampen at all the very serious concerns about the opacity with which this government and the DoE have functioned as it relates to oil and gas (O&G).

If it were not for the Foreign Minister’s inexperience and lack of familiarity with border questions, it would be difficult to understand how Takuba Lodge could have pursued the chairmanship of the Group of 77 and China at such potential cost to the interests of this nation.

The outcome of the British election portends a political shift within the United Kingdom comparable to the ascendancy of President Trump in the United States.

Most people in this country have probably never heard of the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, as it is better known.

On Tuesday last, Guyana joined the rest of the world in observing Human Rights Day, which was commemorated under the theme, “Youth Standing Up for Human Rights”.

On Monday, the 12 executive members of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) met in Lausanne, the small Swiss city on Lake Geneva, to review the recommendation made last month by WADA’s independent Compliance Review Committee (CRC) that RUSADA, the Russian anti-doping agency, should be declared non-compliant with the World Anti-Doping Code in the face of erased or manipulated data forwarded to WADA.

So the Ministry of Education has put an end to the annual Christmas party at public schools in its customary form, (there still appears to be a level of public uncertainty as to just which schools/regions are affected) proffering instead a different model of seasonal revelry, a supervised, sedate, sit-down Christmas luncheon where music will be restricted to Carols and where dress will be confined to school uniforms.

As oil is the leitmotif of the day and the stakes and risks are stratospherically high, the government and the contenders for the March 2, 2020 general elections must be made constantly aware of what has been done, left undone and the imperatives.

In 1987, then President Desmond Hoyte introduced the Guyana Prize for Literature.

In October 2017, Daphne Caruana Galizia, an investigative journalist who relentlessly exposed high level corruption in Malta, was killed by a car bomb that was triggered by a text message.

Last month some serious flaws in what might loosely be termed the disciplinary aspects of the school system were exposed.

Earlier this week, it was reported that four men were freed of rape charges, three of whom were accused of raping children, because their accusers could not be located.

A picture is worth a thousand words, according to the old adage, and this was certainly most applicable to the image which greeted West Indian cricket fans last weekend as they perused the summary of last week’s victory in the one-off Test against Afghanistan. 

The first thing that should be said about physical and/or verbal ‘retaliatory measures’ by parents against teachers perceived to have punished or otherwise wronged their children during the course of in-school interaction is that it is, under any conceivable circumstance, altogether unacceptable.

Almost 37 years after the brutal killings of 15 persons in Suriname and innumerable attempts to delay and thwart legal proceedings, President Desi Bouterse has been brought to justice over his role in this most heinous event.

We are into the season of political manifestos it seems. At least, the PPP/C’s launch of the outline of its manifesto last week might appear to suggest such.