The Report produced for USAID on Democracy, human rights and governance assessment: Guyana (2021) makes the following observation in several places: ‘The constitution mandates a high degree of cabinet involvement in executive decision-making while the National Assembly serves as check on the executive branch. Consequentially, the executive branch of government is both protected and isolated…
In follow-up to your editorial ‘Critics’ in the Sunday Stabroek for March 06, 2022, I suggest that the leadership of the PPP/C should re-read its 2020 election manifesto, to remind itself that it still has some important promises to act upon. One of these is its commitment to re-negotiate the Production Sharing Agreement with ExxonMobil:…
Jay Mobeen asserts that ‘babbling Glen Lall and others who agitated against the NRF … were disingenuous. For weeks they peddled misinformation to a nation, woefully ignorant of the bill. This couldn’t have been more glaring than the massive sign held up outside the Assembly by opposition protestors. This sign demanded the inclusion of the…
https://www.oggn.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Janette-Bulkan-Impact-Extractivism-Webinar-20211130.mp4 The above presentation was part of the Freedom Imaginaries webinar please see here: https://freedomimaginaries.org/event/beyond-extractivism-webinar2/ .
A reader might be misled by the Government’s current enthusiasm to start construction of this small dam (by global standards) in the remote Kuribrong River; SN 01 November ‘Cabinet gives China Railway ‘no objection’ for Amaila hydro project’. The Cabinet appears to have been persuaded by Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo that the Norwegian advisers, Norconsult,…
Dear Editor, I refer to your article, ‘Gov’t seeking up to US$2B insurance coverage from Exxon for Yellowtail project’, 04 November 2021. The Liza, Payara and Yellowtail oil wells are around 18,000 feet deep in the rocks and under 5-6,000 feet of Atlantic water. BP’s Macondo well in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was…
In response to his letter published in the Stabroek News on 1 November 2021, I invite Jonathan Yearwood to listen to what I said at the Hearing on Extractive Industries, Climate Justice and Human Rights in the Caribbean convened by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) on 26 October 2021. In the recording he…
Guyana is often mentioned for less than stellar reasons. There’s Jonestown (‘(s)he drank the Kool Aid’), rigged elections, the poorest country after Haiti in CARICOM and Latin America, the costliest failed infrastructural project in CARICOM (US$250M Skeldon sugar factory), and failed or captured regulatory agencies. Standouts among the latter was the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM)…
What do we value as the oil and gas juggernaut rolls on? On your way to or from Guyana’s international airport at Timehri you travel on the East Bank Demerara road. Every mile or so, a small billboard displaying the village name will flash past your eyes. 29 kms from Georgetown and 10.5 km from…
