…in regional politics
Suddenly, Caricom and its leaders are “gangsters and hustlers” with the minions and myrmidons of the PNC!! Once the regional body was the greatest thing since sliced pone, and its leaders were far-seeing statesmen of the highest order – worthy of universal accolades – especially since one of them just happened to be Forbes Burnham! While there was the “big four” of Burnham, Manley, Barrow and Williams, it was the latter who was the driver of regional integration. But Burnham never conceded that! Burnham was driven to satisfy his megalomania and personal inadequacies of being slighted by the British establishment. He considered the Caribbean a stepping stone to being seen as a “world” leader! He was just a poseur!
As one scholar noted, there were “two Anglophone Caribbean leaders who were, at times, united by the dream of regional integration: Eric Williams and Forbes Burnham. Williams’s integration legacy is constructed around three issues: jealousy, contradiction, and child neglect. These tropes effectively portray how and why Caribbean nations consistently overlook their common interests. The move towards integration was a way of severing the nations’ psychological enthrallment with colonialism, and a central contradiction for both Williams and Burnham was their desire to break colonial bonds even as they celebrated the educational benefits that British colonialism had afforded them. The paradox of the simultaneous destruction of and borrowing from colonialism to foster the creation of “Caribbeanness” is played out in Williams’ and Burnham’s attitudes toward integration.”
Burnham also pushed Caricom because he’d sold the other Caribbean leaders the tale that Jagan and the PPP wanted to create an “Indian State” in Guyana. This was the ruse used to get them to turn a blind eye to his rigging elections between 1968 and 1985. But by then they’d gotten wise to the duplicity and callousness of the PNC, and after the last elections (1985) were even more egregiously rigged by Hoyte (the great democrat!), led by Dame Eugenia Charles, they read him the riot act at Mustique in Jan 1986. That’s the start of the process ending with free and fair elections in 1992.
The PNC’s present “swell mouth” with Caricom, of course, stems from the latter leaders’ refusal – led by another straight-talking lady, Mia Mottley – to excuse Burnham’s protege David Granger’s clumsy attempt to imitate his master’s rigging ways! A “Sanctimonious Gangster” they called him!! Ooooh! How that must’ve hurt!! Fact of the matter is that Caribbean leaders will have to buckle down and get serious about Caricom and its potential for addressing the challenges in a post COVID-19 world.
Guyana – as the last big oil play – will be critical in that undertaking. They can’t allow the PNC to hijack its agenda!!
…in our politics
Just as the world witnessed the PNC hasn’t lost its rigging compulsions, your Eyewitness hopes they see their willingness to also repeat the violence and destabilisation Burnham initiated in the 1960s to grab power. We’re reminded of this by the arraignment of three persons for torching the GECOM office in Linden during the extended antics of the PNC to steal the March 2 elections. One of the men has confessed that they were hired by the driver of the PNC Regional Chairman!! Smoking gun!!
Now, this doesn’t mean the order was actually given by the top PNC brass. But because of the heated and incendiary rhetoric they engaged in following the elections, many of their supporters felt they had “got to do something”! And that “something” extended to violence, for instance, after Granger and Harmon’s provocative words after the Henry cousins were murdered. Granger’s now a scapegoat for being “weak” for demitting office.
His successors-to-be are falling over each other with provocations to violence.
…on road carnage
Your Eyewitness noticed that the driver of the car that split into two on West Demerara after crashing and killing a Venezuelan passenger has been charged.
Will the Police investigate responsibility for the car being clearly sloppily welded together?
