Where… in the pecking order??

Your Eyewitness has been observing the goings-on around the visit of King Charles III with a mixture of wonder and knowing head shaking!! It helped illustrate an old truism that’s been proven time and again as to what motivates folks in our fastest growing economy in the world!! We’ve been hearing a lot about GDP growth increasing the economy writ large and at the same time complaints that the individual incomes ain’t growing as fast as folks think they ought to – with an old, outdated 48% poverty rate thrown in for good measure!!
The truism is that while Guyana might’ve discovered oil – the real scarcity remains a place close enough to somebody important to get into the photograph!! Now don’t get your Eyewitness wrong, – prosperity brings benefits but it ain’t true that money makes the world go-round!! If we wanna be honest about it – real satisfaction for most folks depends heavily on where they stand relative to others!! Or, when as we just saw, when royalty arrives who gets the chance to show how elegantly they can bend!!
King Charles’s visit – complete with the requisite State House reception and an engagement with business representatives – provided a splendid setting for contemplating the national pecking order!! Did you hear the Opposition kvetch how they weren’t given invitations??!! It all had to do with the social possibilities – a handshake becomes an heirloom; a brief exchange becomes “my conversation with His Majesty” and an accidental appearance behind the royal shoulder becomes a profile picture with a longer reign than several governments!!
In our imagined society drawing room, the questions practically ask themselves: Who got invited? Who was introduced? Who merely waved? And who committed the unforgivable social offence of being photographed beside somebody who wasn’t anybody? The curtsy, in this economy, offers an impressive return. A modest investment of the knees can produce weeks of social appreciation.
Now we’ve spent six decades celebrating independence – one reason for Charles’ visit! – yet the prospect of royal recognition clearly awakened a (not-so-) touching enthusiasm for the old grading system!! The empire might’ve departed but the anxiety about admission to its drawing room appears to’ve retained permanent residency!! Of course, welcoming a visiting monarch is ordinary diplomacy – the comedy begins when an invitation becomes evidence of personal elevation, and someone else’s invitation becomes a private constitutional crisis!!
Oil can finance roads, hospitals and schools – but it can’t arrange for everybody to stand nearest the King. That particular resource that confers the status over our neighbours, friends and family remains stubbornly finite.
And there lies our predicament, innit? We wanted prosperity so we could stand tall but somehow, the competition became on who gets to curtsy!!

…in the cloud?
Our Global Biodiversity Alliance, launched last year and now holding its second conference, seeks to turn conservation into income. President Ali’s argument is sensible: forests, rivers and wildlife provide services from which the world benefits, while the countries protecting them are expected to survive on congratulations. This week, he challenged biodiversity-rich countries to prepare investment-ready projects – even the forest must now arrive with a business plan.
But across the technological frontier, as global data-centre electricity consumption double between 2025 and 2030 trillions are being invested to keep our data in “the cloud”!! That’s a wonderfully weightless expression but it got plumbing since the data centres consume water through cooling, to reach 1.2 trillion litres by 2030!! Thus, the grand irony – we struggle to finance the ecosystems that regulate water and climate while racing to finance infrastructure that adds to demands on both!!
A standing forest gotta prove its financial return – but a server farm promising to transform -civilization opens chequebooks with alacrity!!

…is the loyalty?
Looks like Sanction Man’s party’s Political Director – his sissie Hana – is preparing to take over the party after he’s extradited. Today’s she’ll be courting arrest while protesting in front of the Georgetown Magistrate court!!
In Gucci dark glasses!!!

Source: Guyana Times