Those UWI lecturers who were involved with our Elections Recount – and pointed out that our politics has been “Judicialized” – did a good thing. They gave us a name for something that every Guyanese man, woman and child had been rolling their eyes about for quite a while!! And if you don’t have a name for something, while you can bitch and moan about it, you can’t really discuss it, can you?? “Dem palitichan who a guh Co’t fuh ev’ry damn t’ing” doesn’t really flow off the pen to write in letters to the press, does it??
But your Eyewitness doesn’t think it’s the worst option for our politicians, who vehemently disagree on every topic under the sun. First of all, they’re SUPPOSED to disagree!! The only issue is “HOW?” Not by bopping each other over the heads with clubs, that’s for sure!! Whatever methods we might’ve used before the Brits dragged us across various oceans to our old mudland, they decided that when the disputes were against them, they’d read something called the “Riot Act”, then shoot us dead.
When the disputes were among each other, we were supposed to go to the Courts. And with politics, they insisted they’d stoically bear the burden of tutoring us on the fit and proper way to disagree. The rules declared you had to first announce you were a “politician”, and then get elected by the “people”.
Successful politicians who get elected become MPs and attend sittings of Parliament, where they can express their disagreements freely, once they call each other “Honourable”!!
The “people” gotta now accept they’re “represented” by “parliamentarians”, and they must “hold their peace”. Save writing to the press, which is the “guardian” of democracy. Of late, this has been changing, and some folks now believe that the “people” can still express their disagreements as “Civil Society”. The old guard disagree, and your Eyewitness suspects that’s where the slur “who elected THEM to tell the Government what to do” came from!!
Well, a while back, we know that eight APNU/AFC MPs clearly believed that “they could say anything in Parliament” meant they could DO anything they wanted to “express” themselves. They behaved “real ghetto”!! Parliament runs by its own rules, and “fit and proper” is decided by a “Privileges Committee”. They ruled – and handed down varying suspensions – that four behaved in “a gross disorderly, contumacious, and disrespectful manner”; and four even more egregiously for removing the Mace, and another for destroying Parliamentary equipment.
These’re now before the Courts, because they claim they didn’t get “due process”!! But here we are, Parliament is back in session, and the Courts are still determining “jurisdiction”!!
And the errant MPs continue collecting their salaries!!
…Oil refining
The Government’s getting more specific on the “modular” oil refinery for which they’d asked for “expressions of interest” (EoIs). It’s to be located at Crab Island; 30 acres gonna be allocated; cost oil crude gonna be sold; etc. But no one’s mentioned the possible little fly in the ointment mentioned by your Eyewitness. He’d googled what it’d cost for such a “modular” refinery for 30,000 barrels per day. And discovered that the SIMPLIEST one – dubbed a “topping refinery” –would merely distil off diesel, fuel oil, kerosene, AGO, LPG or asphalt. But would cost at least US$200 million!!
But your Eyewitness thought that the whole point of accepting the “bad name” we’d be getting for entering the “stink and dutty” refining business – as far as pollution goes! – was to guarantee us Guyanese cheap gasoline!! But, as you can see from the modular refinery’s list of products, we still wouldn’t be getting gasoline for our cars!! For that, we gotta enter the big leagues for triple the cost!!
What gives??
…investigation of DHB crash??
The investigation gives no explanation for the DHB crash. So how about – as suggested by your Eyewitness – deliberate sabotage??
“When you’ve eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
