Generally, lawyers get a bad rap…and with good reason, no? Well, you really can’t blame them COMPLETELY. After all, no matter what happens after every case is adjudged, half of the participants – the losing half – are sure to swear a curse on the entire legal profession!! And a tad more passive-aggressive there are the “lawyer jokes” that abound: “How does an attorney sleep? Well, first he lies on one side, then he lies on the other”!!!
But it would appear that after the depths to which some in the legal profession sunk (even if it hadn’t seemed possible!!) to justify the PNC’s rigging, the profession’s Bar and Bench went to great lengths this year to raise their profile. As for “esteem”, there’s no hope there! They held a week-long series of activities starting last Sunday with a walkathon and ended last Saturday night with a dinner at the Marriott. At $16,000 a pop, clients can expect to be billed for the five hours!!
The black-tie and elaborately-gowned dinner attendees were supposed to be addressed by head of the CCJ, Justice Saunders. But since when can lawyers resist the opportunity to drone on – as so many of them did!! Talk about an echo chamber!! Anyhow the most pertinent aspect of the event was it brought down the curtains on lawyer redux! ( Q: Why does the bar association code of ethics prevent sex between lawyers and their clients? A: To prevent clients from being billed twice for essentially the same service!!)
In the middle of the week, most of the streets of downtown Georgetown were closed off to permit the enactment of a medieval spectacle that one thought would’ve been abandoned after independence along with powdered wigs!! This was the opening of the “Demerara Assizes” where serious criminal cases will be tried. The police were out in spotless whites and various and sundry legal potentials took salutes after a phalanx of lawyers robed in black marched through the streets!! But hey!! If the politicians who boasted about throwing off the yoke of colonialism could revert to “jacket and tie” before they could say “Jack Sprat!” why shouldn’t the lawyers signal their colonial heritage?? After all, as with the Senior Counsel designation, this parade may permit an inflation of fees? (A man asked his lawyer what his fee was. “$100 for three questions,” answered the lawyer. “Isn’t that a little steep?” said the man. “Yes,” said the lawyer. “Now, what’s your third question?”)
But seriously folks. There’s the majesty of the law that we can’t ignore since it’s what stands between the law of the jungle and an society where justice rules.
And maybe we’ll get there one day??
…and AFC
Your Eyewitness wonders if there isn’t a law that can be invoked to take organisations out of their misery – like some jurisdictions permit euthanasia with humans when they reach a point of no return. After all, they shoot horses, don’t they? The announcement by the AFC that they’ll hold “leadership elections” this June 11 – and Ramjattan would be competing – is what provoked this thought. Even if the AFC weren’t the “dead meat” Ramjattan had predicted they’d become if they tied bundle with the PNC, how could they hold “leadership” elections on June 11??
This is just 2 days before the assassination of a TRUE LEADER in the form of Walter Rodney!! In the last seven years, the leaders of the AFC demonstrated exactly what leaders SHOULDN’T be!! They’d insisted they’d act as a “third force” to move the PNC away from the debilitating zero-sum politics that has destroyed Guyana.
Yet after they coalesced, they not only supported Granger by slavishly acting as doormats , but FACILITATED his excesses! Bun dem!!
…on international overreach
Russia never intended occupy Kyiv. That feint was to extend the Ukranian army. They now have the eastern, Russian-dominated third of Ukraine.
Will they be allowed to keep it?
