You gotta hand it to the GHRA for their sheer barefacedness – what the Jews call chutzpah!! As you know, dear reader, your Eyewitness makes his living – such as it is! – from scouring the dailies with his fine teeth comb in order to glean morsels on which he can comment!! In the more than TEN YEARS he’s been around, he hasn’t been able to see a SINGLE notice of the GHRA holding ANY meeting – much less one where it elects its office bearers!! All he sees are press releases – accompanied by a pic of a gaunt-faced white fella!! Now, your Eyewitness has nothing against white fellas per se…but if we’ve been decolonizing for FIFTY-EIGHT years, ain’t it past high time that a Guyanese of some other member of our famed “six peoples” become qualified to stand up for our HUMAN RIGHTS??
In fact, with every other facet of Human Endeavour, if the same person was at the head of any institution for the past FORTY-FIVE unbroken years, there woulda been some serious outcries by human rights activists!! In fact, the GHRA fella’s tenure – sinecure? – eclipses even that of the GPSU’s Patrick Yarde – on whom your Eyewitness regularly washes his mouth for overstaying his welcome!! Anyhow, the GHRA’s spear carrier – well, actually pen pusher, since he only throws out press releases!! – just said a mouthful on Human Rights Day, a week ago.
Your Eyewitness will just give his two cents’ worth on one assertion: “[w]e need to prioritize the ambition to create a Guyanese identity with which all ethnic groups can identify…” So, is this the right to “self-determination” that we used to hear so much about?? That at independence we “inherited a state but not a nation”?? Well, we heard quite a mouthful about this in the Balkans and the Mid-East, didn’t we?? There was the need to create a unified Yugoslavian identity from which the Croats, Serbs, Albanians, Montenegrins etc could identify. Tito tried manfully using the socialist theory that claimed what mattered in the end wasn’t ethnicity, but being treated equally economically. They ended up fighting some of the most brutal wars to close off the 20th century – and ended up splitting their country into fragments!!
Right now, we’ve got the example of Syria playing out – where the Christians, Muslims, and Druzes had been battered by ISIS – the Islamic State of Iraq and ash-Sham – who declared that their identity was Islamic, and ended up killing or chasing out half the country. Well, after being checkmated for a decade – theeeere baaack!! Maybe they’ll be united this time – like with the Taliban in Afghanistan!!
Your Eyewitness thinks the GHRA should first remove the mote from its own eyes and constitute a body all Guyanese can identify with!!
…a nest egg
Opposition Leader Norton’s been struggling manfully to remain relevant – even as Pressie and VP Jagdeo have been working as a tag team to really get in some serious body blows. What with Pressie doling out goodies like Father Christmas coming down the chimney EVERY night, Norton tried to deflect the damage by pointing out that, proportionately, the 20% pay raise to public servants ain’t nothing to write home about, compared with the VP’s 20% amounting to multiple times that!!
He must’ve felt pretty pleased – until the VP revealed at his weekly press conference that he draws a salary $1.8M that also was swollen by 20%!! When that’s added to the vacation allowance he gets – plus the duty-free vehicle on top of the millions to run his office, the VP’s question as to what he does to deserve all of this hit him like an uppercut to the solar plexus!!
He couldn’t be spending all of that at Bam Bam Alley!!
…a vocational school
The Bishops’ High School (BHS) has been recognised as a model institution for implementing and delivering the Caribbean Vocational Qualification (CVQ) programme by CXC. As a Queen’s Old Boy, your Eyewitness always suspected BHS was pedestrian!!
