…on City Hall
Justice (rtd) Cecil Kennard has handed in the report of his one-man CoI into the runnings at City Hall in general, and the Town Clerk in particular. If nothing else, his conducting of the inquiry over the last few months irrefutably proves that Granger was grossly unfair to him to pull him off the Police Complaints Authority on account of “age”!
We all knew that putative “reason” offered was just blowing smoke up the collective Guyanese nether regions, since Granger at the same time appointed the older, 84-year-old James Patterson to head the much more demanding position of GECOM Chair. But it’s now been officially confirmed: the policy of this Government is to only hire “PNC friends”. As a distinguished jurist who served this country with distinction all the way to being Chancellor, Justice Kennard, of course, didn’t qualify!
It would come as no surprise, of course, that the report recommends that Town Clerk Royston King be immediately fired, and CRIMINAL charges of misfeasance be instituted against him for the hundreds of actions he took that were clearly not only ultra vires, but criminal in nature. Justice Kennard said this was the “easiest” conclusion for him to reach; in the language of young people, it was a “no brainer”!!
Notwithstanding the old Mayor, Chase Green, recently attempting to throw him under the bus, it is also a no-brainer that King wasn’t alone in raping the City’s assets. The Mayor and a wide cross section of City Hall officials were also fingered for dismissal and investigation. The report recommended that SARA be called in to trace the origins of the funds for the assets of these officials – especially Green and King – and immediately freezing those assets, pending seizure when forensic evidence is secured.
But your Eyewitness must confess he doesn’t think anything will come out of the Kennard CoI, for the simple reason that the scoundrels at City Hall were acting with the connivance of those at the very highest levels of the Government. How else would Green and King have been allowed to thumb their noses at all and sundry who pointed out the litany of their transgressions in the press for years? It’s not that the big ones didn’t know!!
In light of the re-election of many of the transgressors to City Hall in the LGE, even the people whose trust they betrayed have chosen to turn a blind eye at their venality. And that’s the tragedy of Guyana: politics trumps all!!
The stepping down of Chase Green from the Mayorship and the selection of the green (pun intended) Pandit is all mamaguy!
It’ll be the same ole, same ole.
…on PNC employment policy
PPP MP Harry Gill wrote a pithy letter summarising the disgust of right- thinking Guyanese at the statement made by the Chair of the PNC, Volda Lawrence, articulating her Government’s racist hiring policy:
“The only friends I got is PNC, so the only people I gon give wuk to is PNC; and right now I looking for a doctor who can talk Spanish or Portuguese, and ah want one that is PNC.” The Muckraker, however, appended this note to the letter: “A preference for PNC people is not an ethnic preference, since people of every race group belong to the PNC. One cannot understand the need for the intervention of the Ethnic Relations Commission”.
But this is unctuously ingenuous. Earlier in the week, Lawrence had looked at a room full of African-Guyanese and talked about the PPP fielding as candidate for the Georgetown LGE “people like us” rather than “people looking like Jagdeo”. The PNC sees African- Guyanese as “born PNC”.
Their hiring policy prioritises African- Guyanese, and this is racist!!
…on President Granger’s health
Following President Granger’s diagnosis of non-Hodgson lymphoma and treatment in Cuba, there were reports the chemotherapy regimen is available in Guyana.
Your Eyewitness hopes the President’s return to Cuba for further treatment doesn’t signal a relapse.
