…Kamala
Your Eyewitness is tickled pink (figuratively, of course, since his melanin content precludes that happenstance!) at the lengths to which people in so many countries are going to claim Kamala Harris now that she’s the American VP. Right off the bat, there’s Jamaica and India, from where her father and mother respectively hail. Now, with those direct blood links, that shouldn’t be much of a stretch, right? Wrong.
Thing is, Kamala’s parents went through a bitter divorce when she was seven, and from her comments since, she clearly doesn’t feel much connection with her father. Speaking for herself and her sister Maya, she said their mother, “was the one most responsible for shaping us into the women we would become.” In another post in May, she wrote: “I’m the daughter of a mother who broke down all kinds of barriers. Shyamala Harris was no more than five feet tall, but if you ever met her, you would think she was seven feet tall. She had such spirit and tenacity, and I’m thankful every day to have been raised by her.
“My mother taught us the importance of a good education. She taught us the good old-fashioned value of hard work. She taught us don’t let anyone tell you who you are. You tell them who you are. She taught us not only to dream, but to do. She taught us to believe in our power to right what is wrong.” The one time she spoke about her father, she jokingly alluded to Jamaica’s reputation for smoking ganja – which really teed him off. She obviously was unaware of her father’s middle/upper class Jamaican aversion to such a hoi polloi stereotype!
India, of course, is revelling in Kamala Devi (which means “Lotus Goddess in Sanskrit), but the local politics of the North-South competition reared its head, as the southern Tamils claimed first dibs on her heritage. She’s not just “Indian”, they insisted, but “SOUTH Indian”! She’s visited South India frequently to meet her grandfather, who’d worked in the elite Indian Administrative Service.
Then there’s Canada, where Kamala’s mom went to do research at McGill University in Montreal, where the latter sister still lives. Kamala Harris spent five years there, and graduated from high school. Will the Quebec separatists claim her? But she’s now married to a Jewish lawyer. Will Israel rope her in? Finally, of course, there’s Black America, who’ve hailed her as a “Black Woman” – which is the identity that her Indian immigrant mom made a conscious decision to raise her as. She chose to attend Howard University across the country because it is a Black University. But, in your Eyewitness’s opinion, Kamala Harris represents the truth about the human condition. We all have multiple identities, and shouldn’t be pigeonholed.
And Kamala will act in AMERICA’s interest!
…underdevelopment
Once again, we hear about funds being pumped into Linden for increasing employment but nothing to show for it. This time, it was under the SLED programme of the Christopher Jones Barbershop fame! $74 million had been GRANTED to individuals and co-ops. Some of the claimed expenditure checked out recently were a blockmaking facility ($5M); a pig-rearing facility ($6M); Chicken-rearing ($2.2). Not one of them was operational!
That’s exactly what’s been happening for two decades. In the face of the collapse of the bauxite industry, the Linden Economic Advancement Programme (LEAP) was a GoG and EU programme crafted with the objective of fostering entrepreneurship and enterprise for economic development of Linden, and was launched in 2002. $2.2 billion for the execution of the project was injected over a seven-year period. At its expiration, it was extended as Linden Enterprise Network (LEN), which was resuscitated by APNU/AFC in 2015 with an injection of $155 million.
Where did it all go?
…more profits
Banks announced that its profits skyrocketed over the last year, during which we were hit with the COVID-19 pandemic. What gives?
Do Guyanese think alcohol kills the virus, by drinking alcohol like Trump proposed with disinfectant?
