By Stephen Kangal
February 02, 2007
Those of us who stood as helpless and detached spectators agonising at the repressive regime of the late Forbes Burnham of Guyana will recall that whenever the late comrade Prime Minister faced challenges with his domestic policies his political exit strategy entailed embarking upon some African foreign policy and demarche geared to divert Guyanese attention from his failures and lack of credibility at home. That is in keeping with the diversionary theory that when in trouble at home rulers choose to transfer the focus abroad.
Continue reading Manning Ducks our Problems and Runs to Africa
The comical though heavy-handed manner in which the police handled the Inshan Ishmael issue makes one want to laugh till you cry. Here’s a man who decided to mount a crusade against the evils that bedevil the society. In the still of the night, on the eve of his planned shutdown of the country, tonnes (yeah, tonnes!) of cops swoop down on his home and drag him away from his family much the way kidnappers do. They cart him off to Police HQ, hold him for most of the day. They then charge him with publishing a pamphlet without identifying the publisher-one of the most trivial, archaic laws in our statute books!
Self styled and pathological struggler, Mr. Basdeo Panday who enjoys the unique distinction of having mashed up each and every recent experiment in electoral-based accommodation is again erecting another ego-centric unity platform carded for 25 January. As usual, unity, whatever that means is to be found in the mind of Panday, must be crafted under his skewed leadership and on his egocentric driven terms and conditions.
There are two additional ways we do not want, definitely do not want, to follow the U.S. prison system. 
A self-imposed media embargo seems to have overtaken Minister Colm Imbert lately on the tenuous fate of his TRRP. This prognosis has been reinforced by the negative and depressing body language that he displayed while communicating to the press at Whitehall on the Interchange. I am coming to the intuitive conclusion that Cabinet seems to have ordered secretly a pre-emptive moratorium against the TRRP, in an election year, to avoid any further disastrous fallout from another major reversal and embarrassment while the wounds inflicted by the Chatham debacle are still fresh, politically painful and electorally threatening.
Democrats must celebrate and document for posterity this defining and watershed moment in the victorious enactment of people’s power by our Chatham folk. The script of the politics of post-Chatham T&T has been rewritten by the simple, rural, ordinary God-fearing people of Chatham. Their message to us is that State arrogance, insensitivity and unilateralism have no place in the new people centred political order that they have now ushered in. No government can now afford to underestimate the will and determination of the salt of the earth to defend and conserve the integrity of their living spaces as well as their inalienable right to be consulted and heard in democratic T&T.