…on the rigging?
Your Eyewitness has stocked up on his popcorn, but he wonders whether it’ll be enough to take him through the drama in the PNC camp!! If it’s another day…it’s another outrageous “jaw dropper” or “floor roller”!! But as he said yesterday, he’ll take it in this pandemic lockdown…any (diversionary) port in a (COVID) storm and all that!
Anyhow, the jaw dropper du jour is a letter to the press, claiming that Granger didn’t know anything about the rigging, and that he was surrounded by vipers who set him up for the fall!! Granger, after all, is a man imbued with Honesty, Integrity and Decency (HID).
More pointedly, the fella insisted that Basil and Volda (by now, after what they’ve put us through, we should all be on a first name basis, no?) were specifically responsible for the whole mess. They were in charge of mobilising Reg 4, failed to do their job in a region that was overwhelmingly PNC, and then tried to pull out a plum when they found out that they just didn’t get out the votes and the PPP had crept up on them! And yes, Virginia, they did the dirty all on their own without once informing Granger, the leader of the party!!
That more than two years before he’d violated the constitution to unilaterally appoint the octogenarian James Patterson as GECOM Chair was purely coincidental. He wasn’t setting the ground for a rigging! That he’d gotten rid of several younger heads of the Police Complaints Authority and the Public Utilities Commission on account of their age was just coincidental. He wasn’t following Burnham’s tradition of having a “toothless poodle” as the GECOM Chair, so that he could have his way with the votes to make sure he stayed in power forever!! No siree, Bob!!
That he earned the sobriquet “Sanctimonious Gangster” from his Caricom Heads of Government colleagues has nothing to do with him breaking his word to them that he’d go along with the recount of the ballots. It was all those vipers around him who insisted that the ballots had to be “valid”, and took recourse to the courts!
After all the twists, turns and betrayals by the serpents in the PNC top ranks, Granger “developed trust issues” with those around him. The only person he could trust was Lil Joe, who’d been his spear carrier in the army for decades, and that’s why he had to start with a new slate – headed by Lil Joe – when he selected who’d be sent to Parliament!! Purely coincidental that being all a bunch of neophytes – including Lil Joe – he had total control over them!!
Just a series of unfortunate coincidences!
…on South Africa
Your Eyewitness is getting a mite worried about what’s playing out in South Africa – long the paradigmatic plural society. Their challenges were exacerbated because the inequalities were codified by apartheid laws. Identical proposals to what were tried there have been touted here for decades by the experts – evidently to no avail – if we’re to go by the recent conflagration. Statesmen as leaders? Mandela and De Klerk. New, advanced constitution guaranteeing “one-man-one-vote” to entrench rights and exhort equity? Done that! Affirmative Action programmes to lift the masses of poor out of poverty? Ditto!
So, does this mean that we have to throw up our hands? No…what we see is that so much depends on leadership. In South Africa, we can’t pretend that the ANC hasn’t morphed from being the solution to being the major problem – and it all has to do with the leaders. Zuma’s corruption isn’t an exception, but the rule. All of the leaders are now filthy rich.
While the masses remain poor.
…on Haiti
The contradictions in South Africa are mirrored to a greater extent in Haiti. Both signal our possible fate if leaderships aren’t responsible enough to realise that if they bore holes in the hold of our ship, we’ll all sink.
