…on City Parking
our Eyewitness understands it takes a stake driven through the heart to kill Dracula. So what the heck does it take to kill this abomination called “Smart City Solution Parking for GTown”? After all, the latter’s gonna suck way more blood from the good burghers of our Capital City than the old Count from Transylvania ever did!
This tale is unfolding exactly like these horror movies that used to keep us transfixed in a mixture of morbid curiosity and fear. We know there will be a whole lotta people slaughtered by the end…but we don’t know exactly how! In this case we always knew the citizens of Georgetown and visitors to its teeming streets will literally get it in the end…but we weren’t sure how gory it’ll be.
Even if you were vacationing on Mars for the last six months and missed all the shenanigans of the Mayor, Town Clerk and the rest of the Gang of Four at City Hall, the fact that Smart City Solutions had moved on from exhibiting the Meters to hiring personnel should give you a hint “parking contract done gone a watah”! . The last vote taken by the City Council when they approved the “revised” plan was just the icing on the cake.
And what’s this revised plan? Well, just a licence to funnel money from your pockets into the hands of the Boys and Girls in the band for twenty years…rather than forty-nine! And then we should know that even that’s a “cock”. There is, after all, the clause giving the option for an “additional 20 years subject to the approval of the City, such approval not to be unreasonably withheld”!!
If for some obscure reason, the approval’s withheld, we can just see the high-priced lawyers Smart City will be able to afford in 20 years having a field day with that phrase “not to be unreasonably withheld”!! But let’s look past the so-call reductions in the penalties for “illegally” parking – we always knew these were hiked up so as to give the city some “haggle room” no? Did the Gang of Four think we don’t shop at local markets?
But the final straw on the unfolding tragedy was the reward by the PNC to the Mayor by electing her to the PNC Central Committee. She obviously saw this as an endorsement of her travesty.
Even though democracy demands “informed consent”, she circulated the “revised contract” just an hour before the meeting!!
…on Social Cohesion training
Six months before Prezzie ventured into the village Mandir of Blairmont to pay his respects to the Hindu deity Lord Hanuman, his Minister of Social Cohesion, Amna Ally had beaten him to the punch on the ecumenical front. As pictured in the Daily Chronicle of March 7, there she was praying to Lord Hanuman up close and personal in the Ogle Shri Samayapuran Mariamma Mandir. It was very touching, and as she said, it was an opportunity to demonstrate what “social cohesion was all about”.
The Pandit, one Deodat Tillak pledged to work tirelessly with the government on this social cohesion front. But from his “religious” intervention at a Heritage Month Interfaith Service this week, he has a far way to go to build “togetherness” among us Guyanese. With several Indigenous Peoples in the audience including Ministers of Government and advisors, he claimed that paedophilia and statutory rape were a scourge in their community.
Now whatever may be the merits or demerits of his point, surely this wasn’t the time or place to state it so bluntly. Obviously Amna Ally didn’t coach him enough!!
…on professional training
The Government just announced they’ll be subsidising the cost of tuition for budding lawyers going over to Hugh Wooding in TT. But will they subsidise some poor clients on their return?
And if law in TT, why not medicine at UG??
