And your Eyewitness ain’t talking about global warming!! On his mind are the tensions being ratcheted up in our dear Mudland following the riots spawned – supposedly to “protest” sloth in finding young Adrianna’s “murderer”. Never mind we first should find out whether she drowned in the pool or was the victim of foul play elsewhere. Nah…there’s a constituency out there who’re convinced it was murder most foul – and are screaming bloody murder that nobody’s been fingered yet!!
Now it might very well BE that the unfortunate child’s life was snuffed out by someone. But just screaming that’s the case ain’t gonna make it so to have the law take its course. What it’ll do is make the folks who insist it was murder, angry. And in Guyana – as we know to our cost – when an ethnic element can be shoehorned into the mix – as it’s been- our political types are very practised in harnessing such anger for political purposes!! And so said; so done – hence the present (political) temperature rising!!
So on Saturday afternoon we saw – thanks to social media – a school in the compound of the East Ruimveldt Community Center ground in Georgetown burnt to the said ground. No one thought much of it – just shaking of heads that the kids in the area would be inconvenienced. Then just past midnight, a home-made (channa?) bomb – which has become a staple in our conflicts since the 1960s! – was hurled at the Police Outpost in the same community. Luckily it just blew off the back gate – and woke up folks in the area. Strike two – as the Yanks would say.
And then a little while later – not too far away on Mandela Ave – another bomb was thrown at the GPL Substation there!! Now from what your Eyewitness knows from passing that substation rather regularly, there are fuel storage tanks that could’ve been set ablaze!! And what a blaze that would’ve been – visible for miles!! Luckily, whoever threw the bomb was no prospect for fielding on the boundary – and as with the E Ruimveldt Police Outpost, just some innocuous damage was inflicted. But it was strike three, innit??
Well, your Eyewitness thinks so. As he’s so often declared from his dissolute youth looking at Sean Connery’s Bond in Goldfinger: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”!! And with the Opposition out in force excusing previous overt riots and arson – supposedly as explained above – to bring “justice” for Adrianna, your Eyewitness is convinced this is enemy (of Guyana’s peace and stability) action that’s gonna escalate going forward!!
Bond liked his Martini “shaken not stirred” – but seems our Opposition’s determined to shake AND stir our body politic!!
…electricity loss
One nugget the IMF team that recently visited left us in their Report, is that a whopping 25% of our generated electricity is lost in transmission!! Imagine that!! A substantial portion of that is due to the physics of electricity moving through electric wires at high voltages – and losing some of that energy through heat. The longer the distance, the greater the heat and loss – and unfortunately, we’re a very large country – unlike islands like Barbados and TT! It’s for this reason that the government’s gonna be spending so much money on transmission lines from the Wales GtE plant that’s being built.
But in Guyana there’s another loss – as far as the bottom line is concerned – in that there’s substantial theft of electricity by customers!! This is individual but there are certain communities notorious for having illegal connections!! Often it’s with the connivance of GPL workers who’re bribed to allow the electricity to bypass the meter.
Laying new transmission lines ain’t gonna solve this source of electricity loss.
…tides
One of the mantras in the neo-liberal economics that dominates the present world order, is “rising tides will lift all ships”. But the analogy sends a false message that we will automatically rise. Actually, we gotta paddle our canoe!!
