…thing in Parliament??
Imagine AFC MP Cathy Hughes complaining that the PPP didn’t do the “honourable” thing when they ran Opposition MP Lenox Shuman against the AFC’s Raphael Trotman for the Deputy Speaker’s position!! What chutzpah!!
The question that immediately popped into your Eyewitness’s head was, “Would Cathy Hughes even know what “honour” is?
Surely if she was acquainted with “honour”, she wouldn’t have participated with Ramjattan in that disgraceful episode to insist they’d nabbed and expelled Russian spies who’d entered Guyana to “hack” our paper-and-pencil elections!! Even at this late date, she might salvage a smidgen of honour if she were to confess to lying through her teeth to the Guyanese people.
We’ll also soon find out whether she wasn’t patently lying when she insisted that her party always had records of dead and emigrated persons voting!! There’s also that contemptable “press conference” she stage-managed for Granger outside the ACCC during the PNC’s despicable attempt to rig the elections. She was caught on video prompting Granger sotto voce not to say he’d accept the Chairwoman’s declaration. Disgraceful!
But Cathy Hughes is one of 31 MPs from the PNC/AFC benches who, if they had any shame, should insist that the new Speaker not refer to them in the 12th Parliament as “honourable members”. For sure, the other 34 MPs from the PPP and the joiner party would choke if they were to even try to describe them as such! Your Eyewitness knows there are Parliamentary conventions that ought to be observed and all that…but there gotta be a line drawn somewhere!!
They say there’s “honour among thieves” …so your Eyewitness feels that, among themselves, the PNC/AFC MPs can call each other “honourable this” and “honourable that” to their heart’s content! They’ve certainly qualified!! But they shouldn’t expect those across the aisles – who had to fight off their shameless elections heist tooth and nail, day and night, in rain and sun – to traduce the meaning of the word “honourable”.
But let’s take a look at the incident that prompted Cathy Hughes to cry “dishonourable!” in the House – and then lead all her PNC/AFC colleagues to stage a walkout. And it certainly was “staged”!! She claims that the Parliamentary convention is that the Deputy Speaker must come from the largest party on the other side. But when, in 2011, the APNU and AFC were separate, how come they voted in Trotman as Speaker and Deborah Backer as Deputy??
What really sticks on Hughes and the PNC’s craw, however, is that a fella with a staff and a loincloth beat out Trotman – a card-carrying member of the GT “in-crowd”!!
The shame!! The shame!!
…officer and gentleman
The Guyana Defence Force haven’t seen much action since they put down the Rupununi Rebellion (under Joe Singh) and expelled the Surinamese Army from the New River Triangle (under Asad Ishoof) back in 1969. The following year, however, Burnham corrupted them with his order that the officer corps had to swear personal loyalty to him, and accept the indoctrination programme run by his young protégé David Granger.
So, while Granger has gone to great lengths to insist he wasn’t the line officer who ordered the killing of two civilians who were defending ballot boxes in 1973, and the assassination of Dr Walter Rodney in 1980, he certainly was responsible for creating the mindset that led to ordinary soldiers accepting such orders. But even with hindsight, Granger has never altered his conclusion that the soldiers who killed those two young defenders of democracy in 1973 “performed admirably”.
David Granger’s unmasking as a “Sanctimonious Gangster” during the last five months has merely confirmed he’s no officer and gentleman!
…confession
Trying to justify her assertion that Shuman shouldn’t be the Deputy Speaker, Cathy Hughes blurted out that while he’d received 2700 votes, her coalition got 217,000 votes.
This, of course, is what the recount – and their SOPs – show!!
