…Republic Day
The caretaker PNC government announced a $229 million budget for this year’s Mash activities– the Jubilee 50th Anniversary of our Republican status. Now that’s just the ANNOUNCED figure – we know that even without the big corporate sponsors chipping in, the splurging from the Lotto slush fund and others will easily take the Mash binge beyond a BILLION dollars!! You see why Granger choose March 2 for elections? The PNC will be getting a billion-dollar mobilisation shot in the arm during all of February leading up to polling day!!
Ironically, the Govt chose as the theme for the extravaganza: “Guyana Together; Reflect, Celebrate and Transform”. Your Eyewitness says “ironically”, because it’s clear they didn’t see the disjunction between Guyana’s reality and their exhortation. “Guyana together”?? Has Guyana ever been as divided as it is now, during this election run-up? The policies and programmes of the PNC have been so partisan that the ethnic/racial cleavage that marks our politics have been widened into a veritable chasm!! We’re certainly even more divided than we were coming out of the 1960s virtual civil war that handed power to the PNC!
Even Burnham didn’t have a government with over two-thirds of the Cabinet and 16 of 17 Permanent Secretaries Afro-Guyanese! Even Burnham didn’t throw 7000 sugar workers into the streets – even though they’d just sustained the longest strike in the history of the country against his government!! No Guyana is certainly “together”!!
“Reflect”?? Yes, let’s do that!! Reflect where we were in 1970 when Burnham and the PNC completely disjuncture us from the British crown. That’s the year he declared us a “Cooperative Republic” and plunged us into an economic disaster from which we still haven’t recovered!! He started nationalising the “commanding heights of the economy” with Bauxite as his first gambit. It was the move that would transform the bauxite workers from being the highest-paid workers in Guyana into virtual beggars!! The tear-gassing of bauxite workers over their pension funds that year was an ironic precursor to the PNC gaslighting them into becoming their most loyal supporters. They even named their town after Burnham – and gave the country Mash!!
“Celebrate and Transform”?? That just expresses the backwardness of the PNC! Shouldn’t we have transformed our country BEFORE celebrating?? What is there really to celebrate? Our 36% poverty? Our 47% youth unemployment? Our stratospheric crime and traffic fatality statistics? Our domestic violence? Our suicide rates? Our public service being the most corrupt in Caricom? Our corrupt Police Force?
So let’s call a spade a spade: Republic Day 2020 will be just another extended PNC campaign Rally for the faithful. Like moving the event in Essequibo from Anna Regina to Queenstown, their stronghold!
…racial unity
PNC Chair Volda Lawrence is something else, isn’t she?? Is she prone to foot-in-mouth disease, or she just doesn’t give a damn about people’s sensitivities? On the economic front, after handing a $632 million pharma-contract to the Trini company Ansa McAL over local (cheaper) bidders, she enunciated her policy for the ordinary citizens: “The only friends I got is PNC so the only people I gon give wuk to is PNC”!!
On the religious front, we learnt from her Ministry’s website that our health sector was “under the Lordship of Jesus Christ”!! Then she followed up on the political front with her dog whistle for PNC “strong young men” supporters to come out on elections night to “protect” the ballots. And now without missing a beat, she ventures into the socio-linguistic arena of street argot to describe the once-sorry state of our NGSA scores.
Said she, the Maths passes were “even lower than a quarter, it sound more like a ‘buck man’”.
Even if it’s “slang”, it’s still racist!!
…US corns
The contrast was shocking to your Eyewitness. Reminiscent of Forbes Burnham castigating Ronald Reagan over Grenada, David Granger had a meeting with Raul Castro even as US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was meeting Jamaican PM Holness.
And other “friendly” Caribbean leaders.
