…not so softly
The PNC has certainly been on top of this COVID-19 pandemic. On top of making the fullest political use of it, that is!! They deployed it as far back as the week before the elections, when PNC Chairman Volda “Jobs only for the PNC” Lawrence sealed off the border with Suriname. In her incidental role of Public Health Minister, she implied knowledge of Europeans – presumably infected with the disease – who’d cross the Corentyne River to infect us just during that elections period!! That neither Suriname nor we had recorded any COVID infections is neither here nor there!!
What it certainly did, however, was prevent all those Berbicians who reside in Suriname and would return to vote in elections – as is their legal right – from crossing. That they’d usually vote for the PPP was merely coincidental! Volda wouldn’t prevent Guyanese from voting, would she?!! At the same time, however, the US CDC had declared a warning of the pandemic spreading in the US…but Volda, of course, didn’t stop any of those flights bringing back the faithful from Brooklyn and further afield to vote!
Now, we don’t want to reprise all the sordid details of how the COVID-19 Task Force was weaponised with the formation of its Secretariat being headed by Harmon. We know, to our cost, how he arbitrarily stretched out the Recount period to give his PNC comrades time to trawl the voters list to claim dead and migrant persons voted. Nor Volda’s still collecting test results before the doctors: talk about the power of life and death!!
But this last move by the PNC to schedule meetings across the country defies even the sickest political mind you could conjure up. There have been accusations that folks in some of our interior regions don’t “believe” that COVID-19 is “real”. You could possibly excuse them on the grounds that maybe they’re not exposed to all the info on how deadly this scourge is. But the PNC? Jeez!! They drafted one of the most draconian sets of regulations to combat the disease! They could pretty much violate any of the rights guaranteed by our Constitution by just saying “COVID-19”!!
But yet they want to call out their supporters to listen to them at this period, when our death rate from COVID-19 hasn’t shown the slightest sign of receding?? What manner of men are these?? Are they actually “men” – in the generic sense – to begin with? Have they no sense of responsibility to the lives, much less the well-being of their supporters??
As your Eyewitness concluded yesterday, the PNC are callously using their supporters to provoke civil unrest and an army intervention.
Lives lost are collateral damage!
…but especially sugar workers
Looks like firing 7000 sugar workers and putting them and their families – amounting to over 30,000 men, women and children – on the breadline hasn’t satiated David Granger’s hostility against sugar workers. And no, it’s not just because Guyana doesn’t have “breadlines” where those 30,000 persons could get a handout or a meal; it’s because Granger’s ensuring that the remaining 10,000 workers and their 50,000 dependents are also ground into the dust.
How can you have NICIL float a $30 billion bond – costing $1.5 billion in interest annually – to “rescue” the industry just sit around doing nothing. The retort that the bond wasn’t meant to deal with current expenses like workers’ wages doesn’t hold water; it was supposed to rehabilitate the industry and get the closed factories to a point of sale. Are the workers to be punished for the PNC’s fair-haired boy in NICIL not doing his job??
No. This strangulation of sugar workers is no happenstance or coincidence. This is enemy action designed to destroy the PPP’s base.
…by destroying communal harmony
Guyana’s political fissures were at last being closed, as shown by the crossover votes in 2015 for the PNC (via the AFC) and in 2020 for the PPP.
And now the PNC’s….
