Guest Columns

What a week! The events that tumbled over each other added to the exhaustion and frustration of the long road from 2020. Do we, as a country, have a clear path to success? Let us consider a few of the incidents. Firstly, the THA’s Chief Secretary announced that he and …

English colonialism has left a long and often miserable legacy. Cricket and tea have often been cited as the most positive contributions to its former colonies, but my interest today is not in exploring the quality of those exports. Something else triggered me. I was thinking of the impact of …

The immutable law of nature is: what we sow, we will reap. We will not get mangoes if we sow pigeon peas. We always reap later. Sometimes, we sow ochro and have a crop in six weeks. But the crop takes years at other times, as it does when we …

In this week’s episode of school violence, we saw a lack of respect for school authorities writ large. The accustomed respect for the office of the Principal was missing. The core incivility of life in our society has been demonstrated for all to witness. The National Parent-Teacher Association President opined: …

“[…] We should seek to establish an advisory committee comprising of eminent jurists and law enforcement officials from some [foreign] jurisdictions (possibly a five-member panel) to undertake a comprehensive review of our existing laws and other measures/practices in our criminal justice system. “[…] Accordingly, all crimes related to the illegal importation …

“I would like to be able to love my country, fully loving justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.” — Albert Camus. The most chilling allegation disclosed in the Vincent …

The debacle that has engulfed the two former attorney-generals is illuminating. We have had a ringside seat to see how powerful men among us run their affairs. We understand clearly how little our daily pain factors into their calculations. We see how reckless they can be because of the lack …

“Dr Varma Deyalsingh has suggested ‘arming the citizenry’ with guns when he addressed the 3rd Sitting of the Senate […] on 13 October 2022… He was cursorily cautious to include with ‘proper checks and balances’. Knowing what those proper checks and balances would be and how to keep them ‘proper’ …

The presentation and discussion of a national budget usually focus on competing ideas about the future of a country. The process is a statement about the development of the country. In 2020, Branko Milanovic, a reputed US economist, wrote, “the most important role economic policy can play now is to …

There’s a coalpot somewhere in my storeroom. And I own a bicycle.  Truth is, I down here long. So I don’t need any advice from any MP about how to prepare for what’s coming. I really down here too long fuh that. And after reading Scotty Ranking’s recent piece on …

“Words are the clothes thoughts wear” — Samuel Beckett, Irish writer. The Budget debate and its fallout sent me scurrying to recall Beckett’s writings. He is the author of “Waiting for Godot”—a play the late James Lee Wah introduced to me in the early 70s.  The state of play on …

The killing of the four Fyzabad youths narrated on the soundtrack of the sad stories of their parents is depressing. These young criminals were in their early 20s. But while we scratch our collective heads, we should recall that these are not the first children involved in murders. In 1993, Prisons …