…in the (PNC) dark
When asked about all the departures of a stream of executives and second-tier leaders of PNC (and APNU), leader Aubrey Norton brushed it off as having “no effect”!! None of them were “heavyweights – who are determined by our party based on, one, the work you do and not solely the position you hold”, he claimed!! Did he ever hear about death by a thousand cuts?? Many think he’s whistling in the dark!! You know – passing that graveyard and you’re scared shitless about a Jumbie attacking you and you start whistling loudly to work up some courage!!
He took the time, however, to go into great detail about a number of departees – signalling that they weren’t the bantamweights he was implying they were!! He saved some particularly vicious uppercuts for Jermaine Figueira – who, like him, is from Region 10, and so that departure might’ve gotten to him personally!! “In my opinion, Figueira is about the occupation of a seat, not a heavyweight. A heavyweight gets into the community, relates to people, and does what has to be done.” Now, c’mon now!! If anybody has been getting into his community and standing up for Reg 10 of late, it had to be Figgy – as he is known far and wide. And when folks start calling you by your nickname, it does suggest you’ve moved up in the weight category!! While Figueira might’ve been accused of whatever, Norton will now lose a lotta credibility by questioning his Reg 10 representation!!
And with the female member of the older Reg 10 dynamic duo, Vanessa Kissoon gone after accusing the comrade leader of sexual harassment – from the end of a gun at that!! – and the male member Sharma Solomon rather reticent in his support, it looks like Norton really oughta be concerned about what’s gonna go down in Linden come September 1st!! Speaking after the first wave of departures, his predecessor as party leader, David Granger, had warned about the “effect on morale”. “It would be a serious error to discount the possibility of the ‘copycat’ effect of the departures,” he said, while predicting “more shocking events are likely to occur over the next ten long weeks ahead until E-Day.” And lo and behold, as the Sanctimonious Gangster would say, Figgy “occurred”!! The respected elder statesman Carl Greenidge – who has no axes to grind as Granger might’ve – also stressed the impact of the departures on party “morale”.
Which in the end, the departures mightn’t lead erstwhile party members to vote for the PPP – they might rather stay at home come Sept 1st. In the close encounters that have come to typify our recent elections, this might cause Norton to stay in the Opposition Office AFTER Sept 1st!!
…for medical services
For the longest while, our medical services lagged as our medical professionals struggled because the facilities and the equipment just weren’t in place. The PPP had inherited a system where – with the now loquacious Hamilton Green as Health Minister – rats gnawed at the toes of new born babes! Even Burnham, the dictator, died on an operating table.
Well, over the years, the PPP administration struggled with those limited resources at its disposal – remember the PNC left a debt burden of US$2.1 billion?? – to rectify the situation by at least stabilising it. Had to stop the bleeding! But now with oil revenues flowing, two of six new world-class hospitals in the pipeline have been opened at Diamond and Enmore!! The facilities – as the president noted – exceed those of many first-world countries! Not to mention Britain’s beleaguered NHS!! Our challenge, of course, is gonna be manpower – doctors and nurses.
This will only be solved in the free-market world we live in by raising salaries!!
…Dixie
Hamilton Green wrote that the Cricket Board head “publicly endorsing a particular leader of a particular party…has never happened before in all of my 70-odd years of public life in our country.”
How about the army and police chiefs swearing loyalty to the Kabaka and the PNC??
