Your Eyewitness was absolutely floored when he read about the spanking new PNC headquarters on the Agricola Public Road being burglarised. Oh tempora!! Oh mores!! What’s the world coming to?? Is there no sense of loyalty any longer? Geez…Agricola’s as PNC a village as you can get in all Guyana, isn’t it? Isn’t that what we learnt from that infamous, secretly-taped conversation between a certain big one from the PNC (let’s call him “B”) and a then big one in the Police Force, who later became a PNC Minister (Let’s call him “F”)?
In June 2005, gunmen led by Rawlins had invaded a house in Second Street, Agricola and had dragged David Barrow, called ‘Gurple’, out of the house and hacked his head off. Gurple’s 16-year-old girlfriend, Shamika Boyce, was shot as she lay on a bed; while a deportee, Paul Persaud, called ‘Yankee’, was shot under the front stairs.
On February 27, 2006, after 15 gunmen had killed three security guards at the Two Brothers Gas Station, they then entered Agricola, where they shot and killed an elderly couple in their beds, internet café manager Fenton Rudder and Assistant Town Clerk Lavern Garraway-Scott, and Taxi driver Cecil Duncan. And this 8-person massacre is what precipitated the conversation that identified Agricola as PNC territory:
F: (Muffled)… watch the move good, but yuh all ain’t mek no statement about them eight people wa dead, you know.B: No, I don’t check pun da PR thing, but ah gon gaffa find out from them in the morning.
F: You all shoulda been the fus people fuh run in deh. That is a Black people community.
B: Well, boy…
F: And them criminals gone and slaughter them people in deh.
B: Well, I suppose when deh need them men, nobody ain’t running out (pause) You know how it go…and…
F: Yuh all shoulda been fuh de fust set a people…
B: And yuh ain’t get the facts about wha going on?
F: People screaming…(muffled)…yuh ain’t want facts, is you people dead.
B: I mean, is you help me out when you seh is Ashmin them.
F: Bannuh! Bannuh! I…
B: You give me information.
F: I, I deliberately turn the thing away…
Well, are things so different since 2006 that the PNC can’t get no respect?? Is this a sign that their support in the villages – not to mention the “hoods” – has all evaporated? Now most crimes are committed by the younger set…so, maybe it’s that demographic that’s decamped?
Your Eyewitness has heard that the PPP’s dynamic Min of Culture’s been spending lots of time with those Agricola youths – along with those in Buxton, Den Amstel and Melanie.
New political landscape opening up?
…in the schools
If there was one good thing that came out of our colonial past, it was the respect students inculcated for teachers. It really came out of the respect for education by our fore-parents – who came out of slavery, and later indentureship – as the tool to deliver real emancipation. As such, your Eyewitness was very disappointed to read about the attacks on teachers by students in certain city schools. And of the weapons these students now tote around!
But let’s face it…this kind of behaviour is coming straight outta Compton and other American inner city ghettoes. Sadly, it’s the culmination of the glorification of that ghetto culture by youths, and it has taken over the schools in what are now called “hoods”. It started with the misogynic Gangsta Rap that glorified violence – and influenced Dancehall singers like Elephant Man, Vybz Kartel etc and now Skeng – as the first step. Look what happened in Jamaica – which had the same colonial background as we.
We gotta get this out from the roots!!
…from the AFC
Geez…you’d think that after Moses parted the PPP’s Red Sea in 2011 and 2015 to give the AFC the cred to have the PNC court them into office, he’d at least get an honourable mention!! Ingrates!!
