Now, some may be wondering why Tony Blair is in Guyana. Some may even be wondering who the heck is Tony Blair!! After all, he was the PM of Britain way back in 2007, and had to resign in disgrace!! He’d been elected in 1997 as the youngest PM in almost two hundred years, and there were great expectations of the dashing young leader at the helm of the Labour Party as Britain entered the second millennium. Blair was full of himself, and displayed a ruthless compulsion to become a world leader; but it all came to a disgraceful end.
Launching what he called a “Third Way” – between the socialist left and the Thatcherite right, folks soon found out that he was more opportunistic than pragmatic. And not only in domestic politics. After the 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center, he saw an opportunity to become a world leader. Becoming even more hawkish than George Bush, he led the charge to attack Iraq for having “weapons of mass destruction” (WMDs)!! And concocted a “dossier” that purported to show Iraq was manufacturing atomic weapons!!
His party leaders were soon on to him, after no WMDs were ever found. He was dubbed BLIAR, and hounded out of the labour Party in disgrace. He had to resign as Party Leader and PM, but like a bad penny, as soon as the blood of a million Iraqi dead faded from memory – which it soon did, what with all the new wars launched, as in Ukraine!! – Blair started to claw his way back into the public spotlight. In 2017, he founded – like former leaders of the US are wont to do – a Foundation to push his profile. The Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI).
With 800 employees in offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Accra, and enough money to stage the slickest political conference in Britain, he’s got a media team to manage his media “grid”, a policy team to shape national debate, and a delivery team to project-manage his priorities across the world!! He churns out policy papers on everything under the sun – and we can be sure he has a briefcase full of them to pass on to Pres Ali to deal with our oil bonanza!! And THAT’s what Blair’s visit is all about – how he can tell the world that he can get them a piece of the action in the biggest oil play in decades!!
VP Jagdeo, however, should be on to him, since he would’ve encountered this type all over the world. Sure, he should be given a hearing, but let’s not get locked into Blair’s coterie of friends and relatives. The whole world is our oyster now!!
…can stop India
Well, how about that!! Defying all the odds, yesterday India landed a Rover on the Moon’s South Pole – becoming the first nation on Earth to do so!! Now seriously, folks, this is big news for the Global South – especially at a time when the BRICS are meeting in South Africa in an attempt to craft a more effective multipolar world.
So, what’s so big about this moon landing?? Simply that we all know we’re running out of resources on our ole planet Earth, and we need to start finding out what’s on the moon. But if we’re to colonise the moon, we’re gonna need water – and oxygen, which we can get from water!! The earlier missions to the moon failed to detect water up to now. But for several good reasons, there are high hopes we’re gonna find it at the South Pole.
In the meantime, your Eyewitness joins the world in congratulating India for accomplishing this groundbreaking mission – for less than it cost to produce the movie “Gravity!!
…but praises
There are some who think that if an African Guyanese had headed the PPP, things woulda been different. Well, Dr Jagan once proposed the just-cremated Roger Luncheon for that role, and it was rejected by the Creole elite!!
