Your Eyewitness was struck by the picture of Pres Ali and King Charles – the erstwhile not so “Bonnie” Prince Charlie – when he went up to Scotland to seek the King’s support for our LCDS. There he was, our wee lad from Leonora, literally rubbing shoulders with the King as they grinned broadly!! Your Eyewitness contrasts this with the picture of Granger meeting King Charles’s mum, Queen Elizabeth II, and our then-president so prostrating himself in submission that you’d never suspect we were an independent nation!!
The Opposition has complained about Pressie’s gregariousness with foreign leaders: giving Mia a bear hug; backslapping Rowley; fist-bumping Santokhi etc. They insist he’s breaking “protocol”. Well, if protocol means assuming a subservient posture like Granger’s, then your Eyewitness says, “All power to Ali”!! In this day and age – two centuries after slavery and a century after indentureship – if we still gotta doff our caps to others while looking at the ground, then what has the struggle been all about??
But why the bonhomie from Charlie?? Well, to be fair to him – unlike his mother – he has always been a fella who tries to fit in with ordinary blokes. But his easygoing ways don’t change the fact that millions of pounds are spent on him to keep him in luxury!! And that all the palaces and “Great Houses” – like Balmoral in Scotland – were acquired by our blood, sweat and tears!! Back in the day, when they were colonising us natives, the rest of Europe dubbed them “Perfidious Albion”. They were a country never to be trusted: with them it was always a matter of “looking out for number one”!
We raise this matter now because Pressie’s meeting with Charles III comes at a time when – with our light, sweet benchmark crude rising to 1 million barrels per day (bpd) – our stock in the world is soaring. As much as the King’s Foundation can help us market our LCDS, we can help his country, as we’ve been doing, by giving them a crack at participating in our development. But we gotta be careful not to allow the old relations to reappear – wherein we ship them raw materials and they end up with all the profits!!
Like when they needed their cuppa after WWII with sugar rationed during the war. We signed the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement, and agreed to have sugar transferred to the EU in 1975 as the “Lome Convention” that was to last “in perpetuity”. Well, we got the stick from the EU in 2007…Did Britain intervene for us? No Siree Bob!! Instead, they were the strongest proponent of slashing sugar prices!!
Let’s remember Perfidious Albion as they seek a piece of our oil!!
…Guyana
While Pressie was in NYC, he met US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and the picture shows him giving the latter a firm handshake while looking him straight in the eye. No toadying here!! And unlike what the Opposition always claims, there was no lecturing about our domestic politics – like the “shared governance” they read into every US statement!!! Blinken spoke directly to our major foreign policy challenge by declaring: “We also stand strongly for the territorial integrity in Guyana, and we’ll continue to stand with you on that and so many other things.”
We hope Pressie took the opportunity to remind Blinken that the only language Mad Maduro understands on our “territorial integrity” is the language of force!! And that the US gotta up the ante by supporting our declared intention to expand and retool our armed forces to be able to fight an asymmetrical war – and so deter the Madman from carrying out his threat to invade our Essequibo!!
Guyana Rising!!
…capitalists
Lenin is said to’ve declared emphatically before the revolution: “The capitalists will sell us the rope which we will hang them”. So said, so done!! In their quest for more and more profits, they degutted the US and empowered China!!
