…and land rights
Your Eyewitness is enjoying these Land CoI hearings. It’s our closest equivalent to those American reality shows that prove real life is always stranger than fiction. Are we going to have our own dashing Kardashians?!
And the claims!! From what he’s hearing, your Eyewitness is now certain this land of ours is actually the “Holy Land”.
The language stirs Sunday school memories of the promise God made to His people in unequivocal language: “for all the land which you see, I will give it to you and to your descendants forever.” And just because He knows the human eye can’t see very far because of the curvature of the Earth and all that, God offered some even more explicit instructions on the right to land: “Arise, walk through the land in the length of it and in the breadth of it; for I will give it unto thee.”
But evidently to hedge their bets against those who may not have heard the booming voice from on high, it would appear some of the claimants to land are using Karl Marx’s “labour theory of value”. Meaning those who provide labour to produce something should actually own those things. So one fella said if Africans cleared and “made ready” 15,000 square miles of Guyana, they automatically own that much land. Sweat equity?
Now your Eyewitness can just hear those whites from up north say what about all their capital and managerial expertise; and marketing and such-like was also labour. How much of Guyana should they claim? But on the application of the labour theory of value approach, your eyewitness has some questions on some of the figures thrown out. Like the “2,176 miles of sea and river defence” claimed to’ve been constructed.
Isn’t this stretching matters a tad? After all, even though he didn’t pay too much attention to all that knowledge doled out in primary school, isn’t the entire Atlantic Coast – from Charity to, say, 64 Village, where the Corentyne begins, around 200 miles? So were there then almost 2000 MILES of RIVER defences? And here your Eyewitness thought the Dutch originally established their sugar plantations up river because the land there was already high and not in need of “defences”, as with the mangroved coast.
Your Eyewitness is also wondering about that figure of 473,000 Africans dying to clear 15,000 sq. miles of bush so that all of us could live the good life we’re enjoying presently. He understands this is the number arrived at when the 100,000 slaves at Emancipation is subtracted from total slaves shipped in.
But wouldn’t they have died in any case – albeit not so quickly?
…with health care
Our Ministers are obviously working themselves to the bone and it’s taking a terrible toll on them. But they aren’t ones to give up, are they? Not our worthies!! You remember they took a tremendous cut in salary when they chose to get into public service – and that AFTER their 100% salary increase – don’t you?
Those heavily tinted new SUVs, outriders to clear their way through traffic, gardeners, $500,000 monthly rentals, haven’t been able to lessen the toll of frequently being forced to jet off in first class to Texas, or Europe etc. But some bellyachers refuse to appreciate the sacrifices made by our stalwarts in Government. Take this ex-Minister Ramsammy, who balked at some Minister jetting off to Ireland to get medical treatment!
Where else but Ireland – which had a decade of stress induced by their murderous IRA – could a stressed out Guyanese Minister be treated? GHPC? Ha!! No Valium there!!
And, of course, the Ministers are paying a portion of their new health insurance like the rest of us!!
…for female security guards?
Did your Eyewitness hear right? No more geriatrics for “guard” service? No more females for night service? Increase the princely minimum wage of $2040/daily?
Who do these guards think they are? Ministers?
