Your Eyewitness saw the finance minister – fresh from his exhaustive (and exhausting!) Budget speeches, bigging up the Chinese presence in our emerging petrostate. True, we had Chinese here from the mid-19th century, but we can’t say “Since then, the number of Chinese nationals and persons of Chinese descent in Guyana has grown steadily,” can we?? Fact of the matter is: in the following twenty-six years, just 13,500 came as indentures; and during Burnham’s 1960s socialist experiments, most of their descendants hightailed it to Toronto!!
That Burnham was one of the first to recognize Communist China as having first dibs at the UN mightn’t have gone down well with them!! They’d become the epitome of a “capitalist comprador class” – who’d made common cause with the “running dog” capitalists in the West!! But yes…we gotta accept that the Chinese presence has grown here; but it’s all been recent, as China pushes to assert itself globally: to match its economic heft vis-a-vis the Yanks in other areas of projecting power!!
And that’s what we gotta talk about. Isn’t it??
Cause there’s a new Sherrif in town, who just got elected President of the US of A; he goes by the name of Trump, and he ain’t too pleased with those “Chinks” – his words!! They had the unmitigated gall not to remain as a dirt poor, shithole country while the said Yanks could continue exploiting their labour to manufacture all the fancy things they feel are absolutely necessary for them to live the good life!!
How dare the Chinks save from the miserable wages they were paid, and not only open up factories of their own to undersell the Yanks, but now actually move up the ladder to create technologies of their own!! The nerve!!
Anyhow, Trump hasn’t made it a secret that his mission is to roll back the “Yellow Tide” – specially in this neck of the woods, which the Yanks feel is theirs to have and to use as they see fit!! You think it was just a whim that made Trump unilaterally change the name of “Gulf of Mexico” to “Gulf of America”?? When Alice asked Humpty Dumpty whether he can change the meaning of a word at will, the latter was a prophet when he replied, “The question is who is to be master, that’s all.” Master Trump just brought out his Big Stick and compelled the sovereign nation of Panama to break the Chinese connections with their Canal. It was either that, or else…!!
So, the question for us in Guyana isn’t even how close we wanna get to China, but how close we may APPEAR to be getting!! Even Sleepy Joe’s administration has raised the matter directly with Pressie.
Imagine Trump!!
…on energy
The American company we contracted to set up the power plant at Wales think they got us by the shorts!! They know the Government has put its reputation on the line that the GtE project must be completed before this year’s end, yet they feel their demands for an additional US$50M must be met regardless. The “regardless”, of course, is that the Government has to get the land stabilized for the massive structures that would be erected to separate the gases and burn them to generate the electricity. Almost 2 million tons of sand, loam and crusher-run had to be hauled in!!
That caused the handing over of the land to be late; but rather than accepting the extension of time the Govt proposed, they want the US$50M in damages – and a LONGER extension!! Well, the matter is in the second stage of a two-part arbitration and mediation process, and we hope that good sense would prevail all around!
This project is critical to our development plans going forward!!
…around biometrics
Back in 2012, the Carter Center declared that “the election process in Venezuela is the best in the world.” Their system was replete with biometric features.
But the elections after Chavez passed have still been rigged by Mad Maduro!!
