It’s very telling that more than three centuries after the founding of the colonies that became “Guyana”, we still talk about our “interior”. An amorphous, undifferentiated green blob behind our grid-like coastland where most of us continue to live! What makes this even more intriguing was the Dutch founders had actually first settled parts of that “interior” – the riverine areas along the rivers and creeks. They established plantations for tropical agricultural crops to supply European markets. Look how deep in the “interior” was Cuffy’s Rebellion and Kyk-Over-Al!!
What makes their experience relevant for us today is that when the fertility of those soils was depleted within a century, they moved to the mangrove-and-mosquito-infested coast and carved out the now-inhabited Atlantic coast! Yet we’ve become more densely packed than the tiny Caribbean Islands and fight over postage-sized houselots!! Even though we know that the rising Atlantic’s gonna engulf us sooner rather than later!! Our villages are strung along a single road and look on maps like ants clinging to a string!!
So, what’s stopping us from reversing the Dutch move? They had slaves to do the backbreaking labour, but now we do have excavators, bulldozers and draglines, don’t we?? Burnham tried in the seventies, but his National Service volunteer labour was bound to fail. The US continent wasn’t opened up by volunteer labour – but by good, old, greedy robber barons like Vanderbilt – who just wanted to make money!! If we had the will of those old Dutchmen – who were motivated by wealth as well! – we coulda long been inland and enjoying the bounty of our continental destiny!! But they say it’s never too late, don’t they??
Pres Ali clearly possesses that willpower – and his party has now OFFICIALLY abandoned their socialist cant!! And even before, they’d openly embraced the principle that “private enterprise will be the engine of growth”!! So now that the building of Silica City has kicked off this year with the first 100 houses, that’s just the beginning!! The plans have now been made available to the Private Sector to execute. It’s money that makes the world go round – and it’ll make the opening up of our “interior’ a reality.
The completion of the Highway to Lethem’s gonna turn the old “Highway to Happiness” dream into a reality. Can you imagine the effects on development of having a five-hundred-mile highway opening up 80,000 square miles of real estate for development in an oil-fuelled economy!?! Guyanese must be prepared to follow the exhortation “Go South, young man – and woman”. There’s a whole new world beckoning – and it will go to the bold!!
And maybe we’ll finally stop killing each other for house lots??
…to Mad Maduro
Your Eyewitness doesn’t want you to think, Dear Reader, that he’s joined the ranks of the “conspiracy theorists”. But knowing that Maduro’s gonna rig today’s election as sure as the sun will still rise in the east, he worries whether the Americans will be playing both sides against the middle!! As he pointed out yesterday, Chevron’s still pumping oil and with giving Trinidad the greenlight to exploit the gigantic Venezuelan Dragon Gas field, they are increasing Maduro’s lifeline.
So the billion-dollar question is what will America do today when it becomes clear that Mad Maduro was mamaguying them (and us) about being committed to peace and goodwill and all that jazz?? Your Eyewitness doesn’t give much shrift – if at all – about some anonymous State Department flunkey warning about “consequences” if Mad Maduro doesn’t demit office if he’s voted out.
The only “consequence” that packs a punch is if the madman is forced to obey the rule of democracy. Which – as Lula said to him – is “When you lose, you leave.”
…to the classrooms?
To say there remains a gap between the Govt and the GTU on teachers’ salaries is putting it mildly. The difference between the GTU’s 39% demand versus the Govt’s 7% offer is more like a chasm!!
