…from Trotman
Following the Budget presentation by Finance Minister Winston Jordan, your Eyewitness assumed the Government would deploy its big guns into a damage control mode. That’s what governments in democracies do when the masses get restive at their actions, nuh? At least that’s what most of them do after Louis XIV and Marie Antoinette literally lost their heads back in the (pre-democratic) day!
Well, it looks like someone either lost the plot in Guyana or intends to reinstall an absolute monarchy here! (Remember Burnham?) And that “someone’s” no other than Rafael Trotman who’d vowed when he joined the PNC under Desmond Hoyte to, “oppose, expose and depose” the PPP. And more recently revealed he made a pact in the Bahamas with David Granger before the last elections to do the same. It wasn’t made clear as to whether he’d informed his erstwhile AFC comrades of his last move.
Anyhow, here it was Trotman speaking to the Georgetown Chamber of Commerce and Industry (GCCI) who’d spoken out vehemently about a number of measures in Jordan’s budget that would affect them negatively. And Trotman had the temerity to ask them, “What are we going to do? Complain about VAT on water and electricity and do nothing, or complain and get busy?” That’s right…businessmen exercise their constitutionally protected right to comment on the Government’s budget and they’re accused of “complaining”!!
That is, they were basically ‘griping’, “kvetching”, “bitching” and “moaning” uselessly!!! So citizens raising concerns about governmental actions, they’re just wasting their time and they should get on with following what are obviously the latter’s “edicts”. In fact they should consider themselves lucky they had something to complain about!! Trotman shared this perspective via what he claimed to be an old Indian proverb: “I have no shoes and complained until I met a man who had no feet”.
So what Trotman’s saying to the business class – who’re supposed to be stoking the ‘engine of growth’ for the country – is “you better consider yourself lucky you’re not Haiti”!! Gotta be Haiti since they’re the only country worse off than us – in this hemisphere. If he was thinking of a wider field, maybe he meant the Congo? Just think of this hubris…especially when he and his Government should thank Jagdeo for bailing us out.
But hold it!! Could it be that Trotman made his pact with Pezzie in Nassau because he just wanted to fight for us “from within”?? By telling the businesspeople not to complain but to “get busy”, was he repeating his exhortation to the Lindeners back in 2012 when the PPP wanted to charge a (small) fee for electricity?
Storm the barricades of parliament, GCCI?!!!?
…on not giving a damn
Now, dear reader, there’s gotta be a reason why this PNC-led Government’s so arrogant. It’s not like their first stint at the wheel when the US backstopped their rigging, is it? Then, it just didn’t matter what the people thought – much less the Opposition.
Is the hubris there because when the Budget Debate starts tomorrow, they know their one-seat majority will allow them to do whatever they want, regardless of how much the PPP screams? That might be – but don’t they fear their constituency, currently being battered by their budget, mightn’t be there for them in 2020? Not that your Eyewitness thinks they’ll vote PPP – but maybe they’ll stay home?
Some say it’s déjà vu all over again. The US again have some skin in the game with the Exxon play. So their visa policy kinda makes our elections “outcome determinative”.
Especially when Exxon’s CEO’s being considered as a possible Secretary of State!!
…and (not so) wild about Harry
Education Minister Rupert Roopnaraine, who learnt to speak “posh” up at Cambridge, suffered a “syncope” and had to be rushed to GHPC. This, the dictionary informs us, is “a loss of a sound from within a word”.
He said, “Oh Lawd” when he met Prince Harry and fainted from embarrassment.
