…on crime
After a magnificent struggle, we were lucky enough to witness the voice of our people being given its due worth, democracy triumph, and the PNC fail in their shameless attempt to steal yet another election. Some of us dared to hope that, at long last, we’d be allowed to break the shackles of poverty and fear that had kept us at each other’s throats for so long. But it doesn’t look like we’re gonna be that lucky.
As Paul Simon wrote around the time when Burnham was unleashing his doctrine of “party paramountcy and “cooperative socialism”, we seem to be once again, “Slip slidin’ away/ Slip slidin’ away/ You know the nearer your destination/ The more you’re slip slidin’ away.” And more than anything else, it’s because the PNC adjust won’t accept a Guyana in which they don’t have absolute power. So, rather than accepting the results of the elections – which practically every country in the world had done after the reports of their observers – they’re fomenting resentment and racial hatred by insisting that the elections were rigged by the PPP!!!
Even after they were forced to accept the elections’ results and demit office, PNC leaders Granger and Harmon insisted – with ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE – that the Henry cousins’ murder was “political”, which in Guyana means “racial” – and leads to racial violence, as it did in W. Berbice. But there was another subsequent murder – of young Haresh Singh – yet no one said it was “racial”, and there were no riots.
And this brings us to the present, when a brother of one of the murdered Henrys was arrested for the murder of an elderly neighbour, who’d been briefly detained for the earlier murders and was then released.
We’re informed that the man was cursed, his house stoned, and he had to flee for his life in the months after his arrest and release. He’d returned only a week ago to his home when he was brutally chopped and killed. Was it revenge? Was it payback time? We don’t know, and it’s for that reason that we can’t afford to speculate about the killing being “political”, as Granger and Harmon had done with the killing of the Henrys. This would be opportunistic, incendiary and cynical.
Similarly, we have to be careful when discussing or reporting on the Fagundes assassination or the choke-and-rob crimes that are also increasing. It’s always possible that we’re “slip slidin’” into the chasm into which we’d been pushed following the PNC’s disputing the 1997 elections results – which the PPP was shown to’ve won.
We know that the Police haven’t been receiving the most flattering press recently. But they’re the ones mandated to protect us when the world’s falling apart.
…the Opposition Leader’s dignity
This new virtual news world is a godsend to news junkie like your humble but curious Eyewitness! There ARE silver linings behind dark clouds? Yesterday, he saw Opposition Leader Joseph Harmon and a PNC parliamentary delegation open themselves to questions – after they’d condemned what they called “PPP blunders”.
Harmon (to no one’s surprise) played the race card when he claimed that Guyana’s Fifth 12.5% profit share lift of oil on Feb 5 had been sold “below the market price”. The statement, being made almost two months later – after one of the operators had sold a tanker of its share of the oil to India – was to suggest that Guyana had also sold its oil-share to India at below market price!!
But questioned by reporters, he couldn’t even quote the publicly quoted Brent price of Feb 5 – US$59.48/barrel – nor concede that Guyana had sold the oil directly!! He just blustered!
Perhaps because it would’ve shown Guyana had gotten a PREMIUM of US$2/barrel?
Chump!!
…into irrelevance
Your Eyewitness has noticed that the bunch of (mostly from “foreign”) activists who’d been flagellating the Government to “renegotiate” Trotman’s oil contract have been struck dumb after he reminded them of the latter’s “stability clause”.
They’re now riding the “gas-to-shore” pipeline!
