It’s a new year…

 

…but same ole, same ole?
Sadly, the invention of the tea bag – which has now taken over the tea-drinking world (of which your humble Eyewitness is a card-carrying member) – has obliterated the practice of Tasseography. Which, in case you don’t know, is the reading of tea leaves that are left in your cuppa, to divine the future. With no tea leaves…no divination! Of course, there’s always the option of reading the entrails of slaughtered animals, including chickens – “haruspicy” – but, frankly, your Eyewitness confesses, he’s much too squeamish to go that route!
So, he’ll just fall back to using logic and his own “gut feeling” (a form of haruspicy?) to look ahead at 2021, into which we’ve now been hurled by Father Time. He might as well start with the threat that’s staring at him (literally) in the face. And no…it’s not the PNC, from which he gives a very wide berth in addition to yelling, “Get outta my face!”! They’re number two. Numero Uno for him is this nasty and deadly COVID-19 bug.
As at yesterday, we had 19 cases (tested positive) with 164 deaths. To put this in perspective, while there aren’t the complete crime statistics for 2020, there were 114 murders, about which we were all rightly up in arms in 2019. So, we should be even more riled up about folks who don’t take the necessary precautions to stop the spread of the virus: they’re literally murdering people! And we can see this from our statistics. Our per capita death rate is 2.6%, as opposed to the US – where half the population have been recorded as saying they don’t even believe the virus is “real” – is only 1.7%! It’s clear from our figures that probably 80% of Guyanese are in the “don’t believe” camp.
So even with the vaccine out, they will probably follow suit with the Americans, who have only taken 2.6 million shots even though 14 million doses have been shipped! While your Eyewitness has been railing against the developed countries for hoarding the vaccine, maybe locals will not even take the shots when they (eventually) arrive. Go figure!
So now we look at what the PNC has in store for us this year. There are already the two election petitions before the courts. But this will be, as Burnham was fond of saying (in Latin, to show off!) the OCCASION for the war, and not the CAUSE of the war they’ll be launching. And launch they will as the various factions compete to be the REAL defenders of the faithful.
Did you read Lincoln Lewis’s chastisement of Granger for not “cancelling the elections”!
That’s only the beginning of the incitement!

…but same utopian spinning
One of the verities of the PNC in recent years has been the call for “shared governance” – read “shared executive”, which had morphed into insisting that the Ministries be shared between the PNC and PPP, to now calling for a” rotating Presidency”! Your Eyewitness isn’t sure now when this change of heart occurred, after Henry Jeffrey, claimed in his last column on “Constitutional Change”, that “in about 2004, Hoyte changed his mind about the usefulness of the Westminster system”. Since Hoyte died in 2002, he must’ve communed with Jeffrey from the great beyond!
Be that as it may, this call will be on their 2021 agenda, ‘cause it’s always there when the PNC is out of office. In 2015, it was in their manifesto, but, of course, was never heard about when they got into office. The philosophy of the PNC is “what is ours is ours but what is the PPP’s is negotiable”!
Utopia for them is to rule by any means necessary!

…so up with the bling
If anything symbolises the PNC’s position on “governance by looting”, it is the news that the Manager of the DHB gave himself an $897,000 wristband from company funds!
Inspired by his line Minister Patterson’s scam on the new Bridge design?