THE Peeping Tom column of October 5, ‘A button and a flyer’ asks that persons forget about notions about a third term for President Jagdeo which is being used by some as a smokescreen to deflect attention from the real issues.

Peeping Tom credits every bad thing that has happened under the PPP/C for the past 10 years to President Jagdeo including the crime wave, the massacres, the performance of the economy and the 2005 flood.

I wonder if Peeping Tom expected a magician instead of an economist for a President. No human being has control over natural disasters nor can they control the minds of others. It irks me when persons speak of things that have happened in Guyana making it seem as though these things are unique to our country and that only because we have this Government that these things are happening.

Government did what it could to solve the crime problem and today after a period of difficulty, things are significantly better which is much more than we can say for some of our neighbours. Look at the crime rate in other Caribbean countries. Those countries are still grappling with their problems for over such a long period.

We have had massacres but that is not unique to Guyana. Look at the Columbine High school massacre of April 20, 1999 in the United States of America, where 12 students and a teacher were killed and 21 others were injured while three were injured while attempting to escape before committing suicide. That was dubbed the fourth deadliest school massacre in the history of the United States after the 1927 Bath school disaster, the 2007 Virginia Tech massacre and the 1966 University of Texas massacre.

These were killings in schools involving school children and here we had people who were hard core criminals in many cases carrying out these dastardly acts. Many deportees who spent years in other countries perpetrating crimes of unspeakable nature who were sent back to unsuspecting Guyana and Government had to work to deal with the situation that arose afterward.

The flood of 2005 could not have been prevented by President Jagdeo; it was caused by heavy rainfall over a prolonged period of time. No government would have been able to prevent it. Bigger countries with significantly more resources have the same problem. Earlier this year there were floods in Brazil displacing 300,000 while swollen rivers in Columbia caused trouble and killed several people.

The United States of America often has flooding and even up to last month we have seen pictures of flooding in Atlanta. So the flooding issue does not just affect ‘little’ Guyana but also the developed countries with resources to spare.

If it wasn’t for President Jagdeo’s prudent management of the economy then Guyana would have been worse off like other small states which are trying to struggle with the effects of the financial crisis that has affected the world resulting in so many companies closing and so many being jobless.
CARMEN JOHNSON