…of City Hall
So, once again, there’s a movement to save City Hall from falling down? How long has this “saving” been going on? How much money was collected? Where did all the money go? Your Eyewitness is reminded of the nursery rhyme “London Bridge is falling down”, which was so popular back when Georgetown was our Garden City and City Hall was its jewel. “London Bridge is falling down,/Falling down, falling down./ London Bridge is falling down,/My fair lady.”
There ain’t no “fair ladies” here! Surely, no one in the PNC, who were handed Independence on a platter, thought then that City Hall would ever be falling down, did they? Nah…they assumed that “the white man” only sipped scotch and soda at the Georgetown Club, and the maintenance of buildings took care of itself. They never learnt that the second law of thermodynamics must constantly be resisted, else all would fall into dust!!
London Bridge WAS rebuilt in 1831.
But the next stanza of the nursery rhyme offers a clue as to what we should be doing right away: “Off to prison you must go,/You must go, you must go;/Off to prison you must go,/ My fair lady.” The point is, someone has to be held responsible for the desecration and destruction of our City’s centerpiece. And that “someone” is not one person, but all the PNC representatives who’ve been elected since Forbes Burnham copped the Mayorality in 1959. Georgetown is a standing indictment on the ineptitude of the PNC.
But what the PNC have also done is to make Georgetown a microcosm of what they’ve done to Guyana whenever they get their hands on the central government. A microcosm that we can easily grasp at one glance as a cautionary tale. The great poet TS Eliot used the imagery of London Bridge falling down as a trope of what great disasters he saw lying ahead, in his poem “The Waste Land”. Just after the Great War.
And this is how we must see City Hall: a reminder of the destruction and anarchy that the PNC would return Guyana into, as they did between 1964 and 1992. From holding its own in being an educated, literate, economically, politically and socially advanced society in the English-speaking Caribbean, to hovering precariously above Haiti in holding out a begging bowl to the world.
What’s the point of rebuilding City Hall? Deja vu from the Government, the EU, the National Trust, private citizens’ efforts in 2015? The PNC have never built anything, and never will. The Linden and Corentyne Highways? The DHB?
Those were the Yanks and Brits’ payoff for the PNC helping to oust the PPP!
…out from COVID-19
The search for the truth about how COVID-19 suddenly burst onto the world to kill – at this point – over 3,510,000 persons and counting just isn’t going away. And it shouldn’t! The first story about a virus infecting BATS coming out of the “wet markets” of Wuhan in China to infect humans just never rang true. Especially when it became known that experiments with the Corona virus, which is the substrate for the dreaded COVID-19, were going on in Wuhan for years.
These fears had been expressed for years, in light of several countries conducting all sorts of biological experiments to create weapons and have an edge over “the other side”. Wasn’t this the basis of the movie “Contagion” a couple of years ago? The theory that the virus escaped from the lab has been steadily gaining ground, with solid evidence being amassed.
Some have said that the genie is already out of the bottle, and we must focus on solutions.
But isn’t banning such research a solution?
…out from COVID-19
That the world has been irreversibly changed by the COVID-19 pandemic is now accepted as common sense, except in Guyana. Somehow, Guyanese feel they’re immune to the continuous virus mutations – without changing their lifestyles.
