Your Eyewitness’ head is swinging with all the arrivals and departures among the political parties in our old Mudland. It’s like they decided to play musical chairs before the Sept 1 General Elections!! You know… that old party game where there’s one less chair than the number of players, and when the music stops suddenly, you gotta sit immediately!! The person without the chair is out – and with another chair taken out, the game goes on. Now, while this sounds simple, it does make you learn to adapt to changing situations, assess your options, and make strategic choices in a limited time frame!! Not bad lessons for politics, eh??
In our political musical chairs, the party leader is the director of the music and ensures there’s as much movement as possible! He strategically stops the music to help his favourites – the sycophants, obviously!! – have chairs to sit on!! So, we saw PNC leader Norton playing some pretty racially charged music – written by his new bestie Hinds from the WPA – leaving some top PNC Indians – Chandan and Seeram – bereft of seats!! They moseyed over to the PPP, which had long declared they had a place for EVERYBODY!! Even those who never used to come to their dances!! They weren’t gonna be playing no musical chairs but the conga line dance – where everybody simply joins the line and shuffles to the music!!
Most recently, we saw some variations of the musical chairs theme when PNC’s Norton decided he was gonna pull the rug – chair??! – out from under AFC’s leader Hughes’ big behind!! The latter had repeatedly dissed him (Norton) by insisting that he (Hughes) should be calling the tune for the Opposition since he (Norton) just didn’t have that pzazz to compete with the PPP’s Conga Line!! In what has to be the unkindest cut to Hughes, Norton then inveigled one of his AFC’s younger attractive faces – Juretha Fernandes – to join his dance – with a guaranteed Chair!!
He picked her to be his Prime Ministerial candidate and offered his rationale: “We also believe the fact that she is of indigenous origin gives diversity to the slate. We think that she has the intellectual competence, and we would find that she’s also a woman.” That’s right – he pointed out that not so incidentally “we would find that she’s also a woman”!! And what a candidate – from the interior with brains and beauty!! Take that, Nigel Hughes – with your middle-class rotund tones and tunes!!
However, the choice of Juretha as PM Candidate left no chair for the PNC’s entitled, middle-class wannabe leader – the hyphenated Walton-Desir, who “we would find that she’s also a woman”!! Thoroughly miffed, she shashayed out to form her own party!!
Whither Ganesh??
…with traffic woes
Back last February, VP Jagdeo was forced to tell it as it is with pressures faced by citizens trying to get from Point A to Point B on the East Bank Public Road to go about their business. Part of the said business being to travel to and from the CJIA – our major connection with the rest of the world we’re wooing to facilitate our oil-fuelled development!!
Exploded Jagdeo, exasperatedly, “I came back yesterday from abroad, and from the time I came down the East Bank Road, I posted in the Cabinet group my dissatisfaction with the Ministry of Public Works. They’re not managing these sites well; there are people all around. They don’t think about the 100,000 people who are discomforted every day there; they just go and dig things up everywhere!!”
In the following three months, things got immeasurably worse. And it was only a couple of days ago alternative pathways for cars and passenger vehicles were identified!!
Where was the preplanning to handle contingencies??
…vs planning
To ensure we don’t have a repetition of the PNC’s 2020 election games, the authorities continued a phased rollout of a national internal security training programme at the GPF Officers Training Centre. Old dogs gotta suck eggs!!
