Conversation Tree

‘The Public Option’ has become a popular phrase in the United States. It relates to the ongoing efforts of the Obama Administration and the Congress to reform health insurance. One of the proposals to keep the cost of health insurance competitive and prevent its escalation, estimated to double in eight years, is a “public option.” It involves the government offering health insurance to those who are interested in purchasing it. Because this would be a non-profit scheme which would require less overheads it would offer health insurance at cheaper rates and would prevent the insurance companies from unduly increasing prices.

The issue of term limits has been once again attracting attention, this time as a result of remarks by Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves, events in Honduras and a recent poll in Guyana. Just before he left Guyana two months ago, having attended the Caricom Heads of Government Conference, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves expressed disagreement with term limits.

Political alignments all over the world evolve over time. Guyanese of my generation and the preceding one believe that the period 1947 – 1953 marked the beginning of modern politics in Guyana. That period is nostalgic for those who were interested in or influenced by political events of that time and even in the 1960s when I became an adult. 

Many people, including me, go out of the way to defend the army and police. We do so because they have made demonstrable efforts to improve the quality of their work, to protect the citizens of Guyana and they lay their own lives on the line to do so. Only a few short years ago during the height of the crime wave after the February 2002 jailbreak, police were targeted by criminals. Many were killed leaving young families. The force did not falter. In the hunt for the serious criminals roaming our streets and killing at will, it was the joint services, army and police, who were in the forefront. The February 2002 band of killers were brought down, ending a nightmare of terror such as Guyana had never witnessed up to that time. When the Fineman gang surfaced, their heinous and mindless massacres surpassed the worst that the February 2002 killers perpetrated. It was the same joint services, army and police again, which diligently and urgently sought out them out and finally killed or captured most of them, thereby ending the most savage crime wave by the most brutal criminals ever to have surfaced in Guyana. These are not minor achievements.  

As a prelude to the privatization of the sugar industry, the Government of President Desmond Hoyte invited Booker Tate to manage it in the hope of arresting its catastrophic decline during the years of the PNC administration. Then as now the sugar industry employed about 20,000 people and provided a substantial portion of Guyana’s GDP and foreign exchange earnings. The plot to privatize, for which no mandate was sought or given at the 1985 general elections, unraveled when the PPP announced that it will not by bound by any such agreement. As it happened, the PPP won the elections, freely and fairly held for the first time since 1968.