…for rigging or Rube Goldberg system?
The American cartoonist Rube Goldberg was famous for skewering the tendency of officialdom to insist on making simple tasks into mind-bendingly complex undertakings, performed by a concatenation of machines. It soon entered the popular lexicon and as Wiki informs us, “A Rube Goldberg machine is a machine intentionally designed to perform a simple task in an indirect and overcomplicated fashion. Often, these machines consist of a series of simple devices that are linked together to produce a domino effect, in which each device triggers the next one, and the original goal is achieved only after many steps”.
“Over the years, the expression has expanded to mean any confusing or complicated system. For example, is “Retirement ‘insurance’ as a Rube Goldberg machine?” Or in Guyana at this time: is creating a voters’ list a Rube Goldberg machine? As they instructed in the Sound of Music, let’s start at the very beginning. When elections in three months were precipitated by the NCM back in Dec 21, 2018, this highlighted the need for GECOM to be able to immediately produce that voters’ list – like they do in every other civilised country.
After all, as your Eyewitness has been pointing our ad nauseam, Art 61 permits the President at any time to call snap elections within 3 months. As the Opposition pointed out, after the NCM, GECOM could do this – as it had done just months before when they ran off the LGE – by subjecting the PLE extracted from the NRR to a Claims and Objections (C&O) exercise. Simple, no?
No!! Ignoring the constitutional timeline, Granger’s man in GECOM, Patterson, started the exponential increase in complexity by ordering (in secret) a new H2H Registration. Fast forward past the firing of the illegally-appointed Patterson to the appointment of a new GECOM Chair. She truncated the H2H but ordered that the 370,000 (unverified) names be coded and “merged” into the NRR.
After squawks of protests at the time this “merging” would take, the Chair just decided that a PLE from the extant NRR will be used for the C&O as of this weekend!! So at the end of the 35 day-C&O, we will be getting the OFFICIAL voters’ List (OLE). No siree Bob!! The new 370,000-person data from the H2H will simultaneously be run off and compared with the (Tentative?) OLE by some US firm!! So what happens if 70,000 new names are found?
We’re going to have another 35-day C&O?? What the heck’s going on? Knowing the nature of the beast we’re dealing with, your Eyewitness isn’t sanguine that this is just an innocuous Rube Goldberg machine.
The extra complexity is to help with the rigging!
…on “green” economy
It was just announced that Norway will pass over the last US$50M tranche from the US$250M Bharrat Jagdeo had negotiated with Norway – for keeping our rate of deforestation between 2010 and 2015 to 0.056%. The PPP, of course, did better than that, hence, the complete transfer. But the deforestation under REDD+ was only part of the vision of Jagdeo and the PPP: it was to help with the transformation of Guyana on the LCDS path into a developed economy.
The most critical constraint to our development has been the absence of cheap electricity. Without this, even though we have resources aplenty, we couldn’t add value added to then move us out of the poverty trap as price-taking, “primary” producers. Jagdeo arranged for the Amaila Falls Hydroelectric Project (AFHEP) which the Norwegians had approved and committed US$80M.
But just so Jagdeo wouldn’t be credited for a transformative project, the PNC and Granger cut Guyana’s nose to spite Jagdeo’s face.
So right now, we’ve regressed to Burnhamite blackouts. Much less industrialisation!!
…for fear
Granger was so shaken by just 5 PPP protesters at the Pegasus, he threw a ¼ mile cordon around his office for a “Cabinet Meeting”!!
And this was the fella who was to lead our troops against the Venezuelans??
