What about…squatting?

Your Eyewitness came across a letter in one of the dailies that insisted we shouldn’t use the word “squatting” in Guyana!! No…no…not that “act of assuming or maintaining a crouching position with the knees bent and the buttocks near the heels”!! Your Eyewitness was pretty chuffed that usage had cleared muster since he’d only recently joined a gym where the benefits of squatting were extolled at great length:
It benefits and strengthens core muscles; help reduces risk of injury as one gets older but – still obey the musical exhortation to “wine and guh down”; burns calories; strengthens lower body muscles; improves joint health – and can be performed anywhere!! The last fits in nicely with the latest medical findings that the best position to defecate is by squatting rather than sitting!! This is the preferred mode in India where for millennia folks would head for their fields in the morning for their obligatory squatting!! Its fertilising output earned the moniker “night dirt”!!
Anyhow, as your Eyewitness noted, it wasn’t this squatting that “Name and Address Provided”  — that’s how the letter was signed!! (NAAP for short) – was pushing to have banned! It was the one our dictionary tells us is to “unlawfully occupy an uninhabited building or settle on a piece of land”. Now that’s the meaning of the word throughout the world – so why would NAAP wanna ban it? Does THEY – that’s the preferred neutral pronoun nowadays, your Eyewitness is informed! – want us to substitute synonyms like “interloper, intruder, trespasser”? No Siree, Bob!!
THEY  quoted that noted authority on land law – Jamaican reggae superstar Chronixx  – who “reminds us in his song Captive Land, this (Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean region) is all ‘captive land’.” Captured, of course, from the Indigenous Peoples who Columbus stumbled over when he “discovered” them!!
Well, well, well!! This clearly resolves that contentious issue of “African Ancestral Land” that keeps getting raised here by the usual suspects!! Granger’s APNU/AFC coalition government had even convened a Commission of Inquiry on the subject!! Your Eyewitness scrutinised the report but didn’t see NAAP as a contributor!! Maybe THEY presented under a pseudonym like “Black Pudding Man”?? Under NAAP’s thesis – as far as land is concerned – all of us here who occupy land that isn’t ours legally should be called by the “more accurate and respectful terminology: “informal landholders”, “informal settlers”, or “residents in informal settlements”.”!!!
Over in NYC, there’s a new phenomenon of folks squatting in houses and buildings – and obtaining adverse possession for ownership after the requisite period has passed!! Maybe someone should become an “informal settler” in NAAP’s home and see if THEY will be “respectful”!!
THEY don’t know squat about ownership!!

…borders with Suriname??
What’s this your Eyewitness is hearing about a Guyana-Suriname Border Commission  (GSBC) meeting before year-end?? Firstly, as your Eyewitness wrote yesterday, we’re now in December and as part and parcel of our inalienable birthright earned through slavery and bondage, we don’t do no work in December!! What next?? Having the Speaker of the National Assembly summon Opposition MPs to vote for a LOO?? That, of course, is so LOOdicrous it’s been rejected out of hand!! Convene a meeting of the GSBC and next thing you know our representative would’ve imbibed so much rum over lunch, he’ll even sign away Essequibo!!
But substantively, what’s there to discuss on borders? The maritime border was settled by a UN Tribunal in 2007 after Surinamese gunboats chased away a CGX oil exploration vessel. Rules for our fishermen don’t have anything to do with the boundary!!
The fly in the ointment, of course, is the Surinamese have never gotten over our GDF humiliatingly expelling their soldiers from our New River Triangle!!

…local politics
From the desultory noises emanating from Opposition quarters, you gotta concede that they don’t seem willing to break our Guyanese no-work Christmas Coda!! This gives your Eyewitness great hope that all’s gonna be well in the New Year!!!