Category: Editorials

After much strain and struggle, all of the countries in the Caribbean – with the notable exception of Haiti – are now classified as “Middle Income Countries” (MICs). This classification impacts not only on their ability to receive concessional loans from the World Bank, but evidently their empirical bases affect their growth prospects. Specifically, it has been demonstrated that it can lead to some MICs being ensnared in a “middle income trap,” that prevents them from graduating into “high income” status. After WWII, the World Bank estimates that of 101…

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After five years of a sustained rearguard action to ward off any meaningful changes in its structure proposed by the “Patterson Report”, the West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) has once again demonstrated its contempt for the intelligence of the West Indian people. The Patterson (Governance) Report had been commissioned by then head of the WICB, Ken Gordon “to consider the composition and structure of the WICB and to make recommendations which will improve its overall operations, governance effectiveness, team performance and strengthen its credibility and public support.” Two years later…

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After a year of inquiry and taking almost 400 verbal testimonies and 300 written submissions, the Lord Justice Leveson Report and recommendations for the reform of British press oversight was finally delivered. The Inquiry had been precipitated by the outrageous ‘phone-hacking’ scandal of the Murdoch-owned News of the World, which finally broke the back of outrage that had been building up for decades with the growth of ‘tabloid’ journalism. The descent into yellow, gutter journalism was quickly imitated across the world as a section of the press followed the sordid…

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From his platform as leader of the Nation of Islam in the U.S., the Rev. Louis Farrakhan has built a well earned, if sometimes controversial, reputation for his activism on behalf of African-Americans. It is not too well known that he is of West Indian heritage, but his father was from Jamaica and his mother from St Kitts. Towards the end of last year, approaching eighty, he visited several Caribbean Islands and this week he appears bent on completing’ his ‘heritage tour’. Last year’s itinerary between December 2011 and March…

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As with the rest of the world, the Caribbean has been plunged into a crisis in the delivery of education in a world that is changing so rapidly that the knowledge necessary to just keep abreast is expanding exponentially while the traditional infrastructure and human resources can only be increased arithmetically. That traditional method entailed bringing students from their homes into classrooms in schools and universities, where they were lectured to by teachers and professors. This is as it has been with Plato in Greece or at Taxila in India…

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There are three members of CariCom that have substantial numbers of adherents of Hinduism: Guyana, Trinidad and Suriname. In each of them the festival of Divali is a National Holiday and is celebrated on such a grand scale, and for all intents and purposes, it is a national festival. This is as it should be if we are to be true to our stated official commitment to maintaining ‘multi-religious’ societies. However, while we have come a long way, there is still a residue of bias against the practices of Hinduism…

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When it came down to the crunch, the race was not nearly as close as the polls and political pundits had indicated. Obama had won handily and Romney, who entered the evening boasting that he had prepared only a victory speech, was forced to issue a terse concession statement just after midnight, with the Florida race still up in the air. Without taking away anything from Obama, his victory has to be seen due as much to doubts about the bona fides of his opponent Romney, as to his performance…

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The Caribbean is probably as famous for its hurricanes as for its pirates. Both phenomena packed quite some punch, but while the latter has faded away, the former seems to be intensifying it impact both in destruction and spread. It has been suggested that Climate Change might have something to do with this. Fuelled by moist air rising off warm water, hurricanes rampage through the Caribbean starting in the middle of the year, with some of them hitting the Gulf states and Florida before proceeding slowing down north up the…

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Guyana’s President Donald Ramotar just-completed visit to Cuba underscored the increasingly closer relations being forged between the Anglo-phone Caribbean and Cuba, the largest and most populated Caribbean island. Their history of being colonies of competing European Empires conspired to keep them apart, since the aforementioned empires insisted that all relations between them had to flow through the European metropoles. When Fidel Castro seized control of Cuba from the US-supported dictator Batista, none of the British colonies had become independent. With the exception of Cheddi Jagan of then British Guiana, all…

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The news that real estate broker, Ed Ahmad , pleaded “guilty” to “bank and wire fraud that included conspiracy” to defraud various lending institutions by doing false appraisals of the values of properties, created quite a stir in his native Guyana and in their large expatriate community centred in Richmond Hill Queens, New York. But behind the sad denouement in this Horatio Alger, Guyanese-American success story, lie a larger tale of a dysfunctional financial system that facilitated the fall but one which the authorities refuse to fix. Ed Ahmad’s rise…

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