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Oct 06, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Do you know that the people of Guyana, through their official representatives, the Government, legally own three swimming pools? Now at first glance you may say this is misleading because GuySuCo has a number of swimming pools and GuySuCo is public property managed (or as some would have it, mismanaged) by the government.
If you are meticulous about the nice legal separations of things you can say that GuySuCo’s swimming pools cannot be classified as totally public, because there are laws insulating GuySuCo from Government interference.
All of this is horse-dung of course. We have inherited some amazing stupidities from the British that make you wonder if the British didn’t think that their colonial subjects were so stupid that they should be treated as fools. Here are some examples of phenomenal asininities the British left with us.
There are laws that make some public corporations and public institutions independent of the President and his Cabinet. Names that come to mind are GRA, UG, GuySuCo and the Office of the Police Commissioner.
What is extremely moronic is that the boards of these entities and their CEOs are given their employment by the Government, from which they are independent. If this isn’t monumental imbecility then the world has gone crazy and Nelson Mandela is a white man.
So the Police Commissioner says to the President; “Sir, you cannot give me a directive; you have no legal authority to do so.” But in actuality, the present Commissioner had his retirement postponed and for three years. So who is independent of whom?
In actuality, an Assistant Commissioner of Police told the Minister of Home Affairs just that and found himself sidelined. The name is Paul Slowe. So who appoints the head of the GRA?
The University of Guyana, by law, is not subordinate to any Minister or the President. But the Government appoints the Council and the Council selects the Vice-Chancellor. Last year, the Council woke to find there was a new Vice-Chancellor and didn’t know who gave him the job.
All Guyanese knew who did that. These arrangements are masks that the British left with us. A better name is horse-dung.
Those GuySuCo swimming pools are owned by the people of Guyana, but GuySuCo staff could say that under the law its senior management has a right to decide on the restricted use of the pools. Not so with the three waterways owned by the Government of Guyana. The first is Colgrain swimming pool on Camp Street. This is controlled by the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport. Only members of official swimming clubs are allowed facilities.
Restriction is placed on its use also because the Secretary-General of CARICOM lives next to it and wouldn’t want to be inconvenienced when he takes a dive.
The second one is in the Castellani compound. By now faithful readers of my column would know that President Jagdeo instructed Malcolm Harripaul not to invite me to swim there. Harripaul stood up to him and almost lost his job for that.
For this I will always be grateful to Harripaul. He remains for me one of the most courageous, outspoken Guyanese I ever met. Readers would know about this incident because I wrote about it several times, the latest being November last year.
Castellani, like Colgrain, is not open to the public. It was once used by the elites of Robb Street and New Garden Street but they have since moved to the indoor pool at a mansion in Pradoville nicknamed by this writer, Hotel Prado, where every weekend sexual adventures of all sorts are practised in the pool – men eying boys.
Finally, there is my neighbour – the Olympic-size pool which lies very near to my home on the Railway Embankment. That certainly will not be thrown open to all Guyanese. The fools that run this country like to tell us how bad the PNC was, when it was in Government. But during the reign of Mr. Burnham there was the Luckhoo pool that was open to every Guyanese every day from morning to sundown.
Thousands of Guyanese learnt to swim there including my wife. I jumped into it once, almost drowned, and never went back. When I became the father of a child, I didn’t have public facilities to teach her to swim. I got banned from Colgrain by Mr. Herbie Harper, took him to court, then when the case came up ten years later I didn’t go through with it. So I got removed from two pools owned by the Guyanese people.
I taught my daughter to swim at Hotel Tower where I had to pay.
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