Baby…

…driver forgotten?
Last weekend, your Eyewitness went to see the new hit movie – Baby Driver. The “hero” couldn’t be more than 19 but your Eyewitness wanted to see what it is that makes the new generation tick. The answer, according to the movie – is money and music. It tells the tale of this baby-faced orphan kid, from a dysfunctional family to begin with – who grows up unsupervised and hocks car for a living, while driving in the city like he’s practicing for the Indy 500.
He pinches one car too many when he hot-wires the Benz of a criminal mastermind who organises specialised gangs to rob banks on his behalf. He’s forced Baby to be the driver for the pick-up gangs. And after they shoot up the bank and scram with the loot – and boy does the kid drive!! If this was the old fashioned western, he’d be compared to those Indians who’re one with their horses.
It might be that some local youth-men in the cinema with your Eyewitness were inspired by the movie – since three of them tried to replicate the bank heist right here in good old Guyana. Imagine three kids – all under 25 and clearly not your average street element – plotting and executing a bank robbery! One of them was the “inside man” who provided the “intel”…they all had disguises and guns and had the presence of mind to “shoot up the place” but not the people in the bank. Movie script!!

What they failed to do – was to recruit a “Baby Driver”. And this was literally their fatal mistake. But it’s not just the young bandits’ problem – it is a Guyanese problem. We all see what the 1st world’s doing as far as having a blast and then jump into it without fully digesting all the ramifications. Basically what you had here were these comparatively well-off youths who wanted to live beyond their means. But didn’t want to pay their dues.
These bandits can’t play the “poverty” card. According to the Chronic, one highly paid Government flunkey dismissed the need to work your way up the ladder as “the old bootstrap bullshit”. Imagine that! But a fella just back from a China scholarship as an agronomist and earning at least 6,000, with a DUTY-FREE car definitely had someone pulling HIS bootstraps, didn’t he? And yet he chose to resort to armed robbery.
What’s the excuse now? In addition to greed – which lies in all of us – youths are given the excuse by some like the Government flunkey that “others” hustled the system…
So, they’re foolish not to also “try a thing”.

…king
Back in the day, our calypsonians pricked the pretentions of the British and their titles by ironically dubbing themselves, “King this” or “Lord that”. One would wish this latest Vice Chancellor of UG had their sense of irony. Here’s a man who after admissions declined by 25 per cent, had to be let go halfway through his term as President of the lowly “land grant” Fort Valley State in Georgia USA.
His request to be called “distinguished presidential fellow,” during his one year “sabbatical” to look for another job was denied. But as an old boy of the YSM, he ended up at UG as VC where he immediately appointed a “Cabinet” of nine – complete with a Chief-of-Staff!! Even the VC of Oxford University, with 22,000 students, only has six-Pro-VC’s under him!!
The latest megalomaniac stunt – after the UG “Renaissance” which called him a “renaissance man”  is the “UG Diaspora Conference” later this month. It culminates with his INAUGURATION – the first of TEN VC’s.
It should more properly be called the “VC Coronation Gala”!!

…freedom steps
The WPA, with a new face – Tabitha Sarabo-Halley – spoke out against the $475,000 bump in rental allowances to Junior Ministers.
Now how about those $3+ million scholarships to Junior Ministers AND Tabitha Sarabo-Halley??