2021
Kaieteur News – Last year was supposed to be a transformational one for several reasons, not the least of which would be our first revenue from our newly established oil and gas sector. The year 2020 had all the potential of glamor and goodness, the twenty-first year of the twenty-first century, a name that equates to absolute clarity of vision.
What we got instead is a split, one that has been forged in the past in the run-up to the election even though the result of the March 2 elections is by no means unprecedented and historic the democratic process, as it was in the 1970s, by soldiers in the relative secrecy of a small third world state, but by lawyers and politicians, of course with the complexity of the people within the electoral machinery, and in a full global focus on larger oil new emerging world. and gas economy. The after-effects of what happened, even if it failed, will echo across this society for decades after corrupting, again, half our zero-sum political dualism with an inherent despotic intent brush.
There is no way that any machines associated with the David Granger administration in 2020 are going to win the trust of the majority of the voting public after that indecent coup attempt by its leader, who is still fraudulent and trying fraudulently, to try to be fraudulent. his New Year’s message called strengthening democracy.
Despite that weak attempt to double in spite, the biggest initial challenge in 2021 is to strengthen democracy in Guyana in the wake of the most vicious attack on it since the height of the Burnham regime. This year must begin with a commitment to reform the Guyana Election Commission and clean up last year’s indecision detritus. Clairmont Mingo, for example, should have nothing to do with the electoral process, and because it gets due process in the case of election fraud. The same must apply to CEO Keith Lowenfield with the jury holding out, so to speak, on Deputy CEO Roxane Meyers. In sum, GECOM cannot carry over its complete failure in 2020, holding its own Secretariat to account, into 2021, especially holding the constitutionally due local government elections.
Of course, no valid allegation about strengthening democracy can be regarded as effective or valid without a concurrent, sustained effort to set this country on the path to ethnic reconciliation. The Ethnic Relations Commission continues to be troubled in this regard, despite its constitutional mandate to take the lead in this area, although what appears to be consolidating in the pages of letters and columns’ This newspaper is a tough, aggressive but necessary discourse on the contours of our ethnic divide. Unless we develop and extend this momentum, we will continue to fail to establish and maintain a truly cohesive state, a true republican democracy governed for the benefit of all our people.
Without good governance for all, there will never be development for the majority. Our laws will continue to be enforced and enforced unevenly and our justice system will continue to be inferior, despite the mightiest efforts of the best and brightest (Chief Justice Madame Roxane George-Wiltshire, for example ) within our judiciary.
And, finally, there is no area where our failure to evolve (and innovate) our governance systems will be more visually effective than in our economic development. The reality is that unless something truly transformational happens in this society in terms of democratic systems, social reconciliation and governance, the majority of the citizens of this country will continue to live in nasty poverty, the likelihood is that poverty will go i a significant increase with an economic gap widening between a small clique of the very wealthy and a large number of people ironically poor by the new wealth of their country This new year presents far more challenges against the backdrop of the great pandemic than it does, but there is nothing that we as humans cannot overcome with the will to do and be better.