The PNC used to have an ironic slogan during the days when they destroyed the country and everything in it with their vindictiveness and compulsion to control everything and every person – “Progress Never Ceases”!! The acronym, of course, spelt out PNC!! Well, with our revenues from oil flowing steadily into our coffers, all citizens are expecting the Government of the day – the PPP, in another twist of irony!! – to make the slogan reality. Your Eyewitness wonders whether they’ll adopt the name – and its acronym – going forward!! With us being so politicised and all, he doubts that’ll happen anytime!!
Well, as one of the innovations to signal our progress the Government just announced that with the assistance of Abu Dhabi, we’ll soon have Electronic data ID Cards. Imagine that…Abu Dhabi now providing cutting-edge electronic thingmajigs!! There’s hope for us, no?? And what will this card do, you ask, Dear Reader?? Like all those physical gadgets that are now ABSOLUTELY necessary to “save labour and time” for those of us who have to be in the kitchen – these eID will save so much more in the new world that oil is sliding us into!! For instance, with all those rich countries providing us with “visa free” travel maybe we’ll now slide right past those pesky immigration agents?? And not be sent back like that fella from Linden?? Let’s see!! According to VP Jagdeo, who made the announcement, there will be a chip embedded in the card that “can store a lot of the biometric data. Blood type, data for driver’s licence, GRA, your TIN number, etc”. Now the moment your Eyewitness read the “etc” bit, his antenna jumped to attention. Back at the turn of the millennia, hadn’t Estonia introduced just such a card that was a “unique key to access public services – from healthcare to business registry, from i-voting to e-residency.” Welcome to a brave new world!! But with his experience of the Burnhamite dictatorship, he immediately assumed this gave Big Brother a free pass into all his affairs.
And nothing that’s happened since 1984 has diminished Your Eyewitness’s paranoia. Imagine he and the Missus were talking casually about buying a shirt for the young Eyewitness then presto!! Ads for shirts started popping up like Jumbie Umbrellas on his smart phone!! Ever since then they’ve had to adopt the strategy they used when the kids were small – don’t say anything sensitive around them unless you want to have it blurted out to any visitor to the home!! In the case of the card it would literally be “Big Brother”!!
Now your Eyewitness knows that these innovations are inevitable in the new seamless world opening up to us moving from a sh*thole country to having the highest growth rate in the world!! But you gotta take precautions!!
…schoolchildren
Here we go again – another schoolchild savagely and mercilessly beaten by some of his “schoolmates” – in inverted commas since these certainly weren’t “mates” of any type. Unlike the student from GTI who was actually pummelled and kicked to death in the Stabroek Market area – where it appears passers-by and habitues feel there’s nothing untoward about such violence – this time it was in the vicinity of Parade Ground. And a father who happened to be a football coach and used to dealing with rambunctious youths – intervened to prevent the student from nearby Christ Church from being murdered.
So, what is it that’s creating these feral children? And feral they are…for even though school kids have gotten into tussles from the time of Cain and Abel – that incident served as a cautionary tale as how kids ought to behave towards each other. And friends are supposed to “part” them.
Our schools are failing us in this area!!
…land relations
In a time where there are daily accusations of Government land given away to this or that crony – of both Governments – comes the story of a private owner giving land to the Government!!
Man bites dog!!
