With Opposition Leader Norton marching up and down in front of Pressie’s Office, guess you’re wondering – once again, dear reader – wondering when PNC politicians gonna bring peace and prosperity – to our dear Mudland. Ever since Burnham split the PPP nationalist movement in 1955, he exploited our ethnic identities to congeal us into warring factions. Periodically these factions erupt into violence – like what happened on the night of Adrianna’s autopsy – that end up not only with looted stores and bodies in the streets – but deepening divisions.
What to do?? Well we can do worse than look at how one poor colonized country – by Germany and Belgium – with even starker ethnic divisions, did it. If you think we’re too violence prone, this country had EIGHT HUNDRED THOUSAND members of one ethnic group hacked to death by the competing ethnic group!! Yet today, it’s regarded as one of the most stable democracies in Africa, making steady progress to climb out of progress and becoming the toast of the developing world.
Your Eyewitness, of course, is talking about Rwanda whose President Paul Kagame showed up at the Caricom HoG meet a couple of years ago to discuss opening up a pharmaceutical manufacturing facility in the Caribbean. The year before, even though Rwanda was never no British colony, it was accepted into the Commonwealth – and even hosted that organization’s HoG meeting!!
Maybe we can look at how Kagame was able to bring peace and stability to his country – fractured along its Hutu and Tutsi ethnic groups. Back in 1994, it was the majority Hutu who’d massacred 800,000 of the minority Tutsi – and ended up ruling the country – after being favoured by the colonial powers. But Kagame lead a Tutsi force from neighbouring Congo – which overthrew the Hutu government and has been ruling ever since to deliver a thriving economy!! And peace for all!!
But didn’t your Eyewitness say Rwanda was a democracy?? Well it is: Kagame’s been holding elections which his party – the Tutsi dominated Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) – keeps winning!! He’s on his 4th term!! Most government officials are Tutsis, even though Hutus are 80%. His most pertinent innovation has been TO BAN THE USE OF ETHNIC LABELS in public!! That’s right…folks can’t mobilize on ethnic lines – excepting on “Genocide Day”!! It’s One Rwanda down the line!! Like Lee kwan Yu of Singapore, Kagame has been called “authoritarian” for cracking down on political types who don’t toe the line.
Rwanda’s on its second “National Strategy for Transformation” within a “Vision 2050- with the goal of becoming a higher middle income country by 2035 and a high income one by 2050.
A hint to Beneba mek Ali tek notice??
…for Scrapes?
The buzz on Scrapeheads reminded your Eyewitness of one of the features of our early urban landscape in what was dubbed the “slums”. While nowadays many have focused on the poverty, crime and pickpockets of Albouystown – which most are familiar with, it was Tiger Bay that was more infamous back in the day. When GT burnt down in 1962, Sparrow sang – “Ah doan care if the whole a BG burn down/ But they will be putting me out me way/ If they tackle Tiger Bay/ A bun dung de hotel/ where all me wahbine does stay”!!
One historian wrote that the denizens of the slums rejected “the Victorian social norms of modesty, dignity, orderliness, productivity and decorum, and exhibited counter values of gregariousness, bravado, loudness, ribaldry, rowdiness, aggression and coarse vulgarity”!! In 1905 they terrorized the entire GT by burning and looting the stores of the White Europeans. They were called “centipedes”!!
So have they progressed more than a hundred years later as “Scrapeheads”??
