…what to do at GECOM
The old saw in the media business is that “dog bites man” isn’t news, but “man bites dog”? That’s another story!! A newsworthy one!! Well, in Guyana, we now have our own metaphor for newsworthiness – “GECOM sticks to its schedule”!! It all started, of course, after the NCM, when, the very next day, the GECOM PRO announced they were absolutely in a position to conduct a General Election within the mandated 3 months.
A year later – and after a thousand excuses were exhausted – GECOM finally, reluctantly conceded they could pull one off by March 2020!! For a body in which the Chair rakes in a cool $2million per month and the Secretariat has billions at its disposal for elections, you’d think they’d be working like a well-oiled machine, wouldn’t you?? After all, the CEO could purchase whatever in the world he thinks necessary for elections. $100 million for radio sets? No problem – even when the sets were never used – or could never be used because they were defective and sole sourced by the CEO!! Or $6000 pliers.
This year, after experiencing the tensions (and sometimes riots) that occur when election results aren’t declared ASAP, GECOM once again promised to speed up the process. Famous last words!! Here we are, a month later, and we still don’t have an accepted elections result. And it wasn’t just the “highly trained staff”. There was the Secretariat having to drag its entire operations from Ashmins at High and Hadfield Streets all the way to GECOM HQ. Why? To have access to a projector to display SOPs on a bed sheet – with all the choppiness and graininess of a B&W silent flick from the 1920s!! Don’t ask why the projector and bed sheet couldn’t, weren’t, brought TO Ashmins: the mountain had to come to Mohamed!
But while the GECOM Secretariat have thrown their spanners and the kitchen sink into the works, the GECOM Commission – pretty much the Chair, since the six Commissioners are evenly split down the middle between the Government and the Opposition – hasn’t been lagging in dragging its feet. During the series-of-unfortunate-events led by Mingo over at Ashmins, the Chair could’ve cut whatever knot – gordian or otherwise – with a snap of her fingers. The snap never came!
And we arrive at the latest roadblock: even though the Full Court declared that nothing could stop GECOM to order a recount – and the Guyanese public were promised a meeting yesterday – nothing happened!! The Government Commissioners said they needed time “to study” the decision!!
Couldn’t the Chair have met with the three Opposition Commissioners and made the call??
Wasn’t that how the H2H was launched??
…the Corona response
There’re probably a billion armchair experts out there with ideas to deal with the COCID-19 pandemic. So, your Eyewitness’s not about to add to the Tower of Babel. But he must say he found a glaring lacuna in the “National Health Plan for Public Health”: inclusive of shoulders to the wheel. Shouldn’t the Opposition have been invited into the effort??
It’s certainly no secret that we’ve been officially declared by the IMF to be among the “least prepared” in the hemisphere to deal with the crisis. On par with Haiti. One of the key areas we’re weak in is in manpower to lead this effort: especially at the community level, where this battle will be won or lost in trying to contain the spread and spike of the critically ill. This isn’t just making wild guesses: we have seen, from the response up to now, the chaotic response in preparedness for isolation etc.
For sure, your Eyewitness thought the PPP’s “COVID-19 Response Multi-Stakeholder forum” would’ve been invited.
And it’s not even power sharing. It’s responsibility sharing!!
…shared governance
Has it struck you, dear reader, that this talk of “shared governance” is coming from allies of the PNC, which flattered to deceive on that idea in its 2015 manifesto?
And which was excised from its “Decade of Development”??
