Today, the elephant in the room is the Local Government Elections…but your Eyewitness can’t get into it – lest he be accused of trying to influence the voting!! Cause how do you talk about LGE 2023 and not mention that fella who – like Voldemort – can’t be mentioned?? That’ll be like discussing the sinking of the Titanic and not mention the iceberg!! And we know there’s a massive sinking about to happen in Guyana, don’t we??
Anyhow, a few days ago, your Eyewitness noticed an article in the Jamaica Gleaner – announcing that a study commissioned to quantify the Reparations owed by the Countries that participated in enslaving Africans across the Atlantic – “Transatlantic Chattel Slavery”(TCS) – came up with the number US$107 TRILLION!! Imagine that!! That’s US$107,000,000,000,000!! Well, our Eyewitness can’t imagine that much money…since the amount he receives monthly doesn’t even amount to US$1000!! Just for comparison, the number of stars in our Milky Way Galaxy is just 100 billion!!
Your Eyewitness is fully supportive of Reparations for descendants of those who were enslaved by the European colonizers as they exploited the wealth of the New World using the TCS labour of the more than 10 million human beings for FREE! This Report shows that the Caricom Reparations Commission (CRC) has continued – and now broadened – its efforts to bring justice and relief for the descendants of the victims of that “crime against humanity”.
It was formed in 2013 by the CariCom heads of government. They immediately crafted a concrete 10-point Plan for Reparations and encouraged their fifteen members to launch local Reparations Committees to support the plan. The then PPP government enthusiastically supported both initiatives which would benefit the 31 countries that were affected by TCS. The CRC hired US economists from The Brattle Group – guided by a team of lawyers, historians, and history students – to compile the quantum of damages that can now be taken to a court – since the offending countries such as Britain, France, Spain, Netherlands, Portugal, etc…have steadfastly refused to acknowledge responsibility for the enduring structural conditions TCS unleashed.
To assess the reparations due, it must be established that the injuries or harm suffered by the enslaved are the consequence of wrongful conduct by those who carried out TCS. Tinhat’s what the Brattle Group did, using the methodology used in the Judicial System to calculate damages to persons such as loss of life, uncompensated labour, loss of liberty, personal injury, mental pain and anguish, and the rape – of African women by White slave owners.
Britain, for instance, is required to pay 14 countries $24 trillion – with Jamaica to collect $9.5 trillion. Your Eyewitness hopes the local GRC will find out what’s coming to Guyana.
…exams
Our Secondary Schools students are busy writing their CXCs and CAPE Exams. And in a couple of months, we’ll all gasp in amazement at those special students who’re inexorably inching towards writing the TOTAL number of subjects offered by CXC!! Thirty-five, he believes. And as he’s been doing for the past decade, he asks once again – to what end?? It used to be that poor students went that route to obtain scholarships to foreign universities. It was like the situation in the NBA where millions of Ghetto youths spend their entire life trying to get into the couple of hundred places available!!
But the new Guyana’s different. Not only is there the GOAL program with 20,000 scholarships for whatever subject you can think of, but the government also assists gifted students into the top tier foreign schools. So your Eyewitness hopes that at long last, students will now turn their attention to preparing themselves for skills that the country needs in its present development trajectory.
Like engineers of all types!!
…standards
And as we witness the slow transformation of our economy and society into first world aspirations, let’s all begin transforming our standards accordingly. We’re not gonna enjoy a first world life style with a ghetto mentality!! Pearls to swine??
