In politics most practitioners have taken the art of virtue signalling to a whole new level. To listen to them, you’d think butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, and every day, they rush into burning buildings to rescue trapped babies!! Not to mention working 24/7 to serve us, the people, body and soul. But not our LOO (not the outhouse, Dear Reader, but our Leader Of the Opposition, get it?), Aubrey Norton!! No siree, Bob!! Aubrey marches to the beat of his own drummer!!
Shaking the hand of the winner of an election where you’ve lost? Naaah… not Norton!! You’d think he never looked at – much less played – a game of cricket, which taught us how to act “proper and signal we were “cultivated”!! Smiling good-naturedly when an opponent makes a crack at your expense in Parliament? Not Norton! His scowl’s been ossified into his face, so he always looks like “cow bruk rope”!!
So your Eyewitness wasn’t surprised when he read Norton refused to sign the ERC’s Code of Conduct (ERC-COC) agreement. Here, parties contesting the elections affirmed their commitment to peaceful, respectful, and lawful campaigning – and acceptance of election results. But frankly, why should Norton?? “Peaceful, respectful, and lawful?” That ain’t the beat Norton’s drummer beats out!!
Throughout his long career in the PNC – starting with the YSM – his motto’s been “war, in-your-face disrespect and unlawful”!! If the truth be told, it’s the reason he’s the PNC leader today!! After Granger bowed to international pressure and conceded that his rig attempt hadn’t struck paydirt, PNC kingmakers decided that Norton was the man who’d make the country ungovernable. When Hoyte did this back in the day – with slow fyaah; mo’ fyaah – to depose the PPP, Norton had been in the streets leading the charge!!
But as the new PNC leader, he hemmed and hawed because of changed circumstances, making that strategy questionable. He was derided, and a slew of upstarts tried to oust him. In not signing the ERC-COC, he’s signalling he might return to the streets when he loses the Sept 1st elections!! When…no “if”!! But one of the mushroom parties that sprung up also didn’t sign – the Forward Guyana Movement (FGM) led by Amanza Desir and that anti-LGBTQIA+ pastor!! Well, Amanza might be worried she’s also seen as “soft” – and might also be signalling she’s gonna be looking to develop some street cred!! Your Eyewitness just hopes she doesn’t join the pastor and start beating up on LGBTQIA+s.
The sanctioned fella’s WIN party unsurprisingly signed along the ERC-COC’s line? Why “unsurprisingly”?? Well surely he doesn’t want to add “election violence” to the reasons why the Yanks are all over him like a cheap suit!!
…on Burnham’s grave
Your Eyewitness was reminded by a letter in the press from Hamilton Green about his master Forbes Burnham’s death anniversary forty years ago – Aug 6, 1985. Green – “the Elder”, as he dubs himself! – claimed Burnham “stood up against the people who enslaved us, who brought us here as slaves and indentured labourers.” Now it’s quite possible Green might be having an “elder moment” – since he’s confessed to being an “elder” – but wasn’t it the Brits who brought us here as “slaves and indentured labourers’?
So when Burnham connived with those Brits – according to THEIR now declassified records – to plunge our country into ethnic violence in 1962 to remove the PPP Government, he “stood up” to them?? Or when the Brits passed him on to the Yanks and they paid him US$5000 monthly and he stood up to collect the cash, is that what Green understands by “stood up”??
We know Green must sanitise Burnham for his own relevance – but he gotta watch these senior moments!!
