Latest update April 20th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 26, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Magistrate Leron Daly jailed Rohan Chand for nine months for stealing cigarettes. No fine was imposed. No community service ordered. This sentence comes two weeks after one of the world’s worst prison fires – inmates burnt down the central prison and the staff club in Guyana. After the July 9 arson there was consensus in the society, including the government leaders, that jail for non-violent crimes and unrealistic bail would be reviewed.
There will be more jail terms as with the cigarette stealer here, time will pass, and there will be another prison inferno in five to ten years’ time. This is life in Dante’s Inferno in a Caribbean/South American country named Guyana.
A jeweller was robbed in the Hydronie market in East Bank Essequibo. Persons who witnessed the incident couldn’t get the police on the phone and the police came hours after, and were brought to the scene by the victim’s relative, who had to go to the station to transport them.
Research the newspapers thirty years ago and there will be identical stories. Go back twenty years ago and read the newspapers and you will find startling similarities. Go to Google and read the newspapers five years ago and the situation that the Hydronie victim found himself in, you will see dozens of similar ones. So the logical question is; what changes in this place?
I met Orette Cutting at the wake of the Michelle Ramsaroop, wife of Gerhard, who passed away last week. Cutting introduced himself. He writes frequent letters in the newspapers that are eye-openers. So we chatted, and my pessimistic advice to him was that hardly anything will change in this country. He told me he holds a state job, and I warned him to be careful, because all ruling politicians in this country the past umpteen years have been and are thin-skinned autocrats.
Cutting provided some information to the Guyanese people that really startled me. He wrote that the hours the Brickdam police station allocates for vehicular fitness examination were the same hours forty years ago. The timing hasn’t changed since then. But guess what changed and in a monumental way – the amount of vehicles on the roadways. I will always remember what former High Court judge, William Ramlal, told me in a casual, random conversation on the High Court balcony. He said in the sixties there were about five murder cases during the assizes, but look at the murder cases in one assize in this age – about a hundred (my estimate). Yet the quota of judges in the 21st century is the same as in the sixties.
It simply lacerates one’s psyche to think a country can be so stupendously backward. And there is no shortage, since Independence, of citizens who want to be Prime Minister or President. Come 2020 election, the PPP, PNC, AFC and other parties will endure tempestuous internal jostles among contenders for the presidential slot.
There are those who preserved this backward mess and want to lead Guyana again. I can hardly give the current government a pass grade but, in all honesty, how could they have coped with the millions of Augean stables they have inherited from a political party that ruled Guyana for twenty-three years. It simply boggles the mind to think that in the 21st century, one organization administered the affairs of a country for 23 years, yet policemen took hours to arrive on a crime scene during those entire twenty-three years; that policemen had to be transported by the victim to the crime scene in all those twenty-three years; that a citizen had to provide transport for a court marshal during those twenty-three years.
I read in the news that UG is having a diaspora conference to help the university, and the two keynote speakers are the President and the Chief Whip of the Opposition, Ms. Gail Teixeira. I couldn’t believe what I was reading. This lady was a minister for twenty-three years. During her tenure, she sat on the Council of the University where her authority was stamped on the university. And in those years, the university declined to the extent that its medical degree lost Caribbean accreditation, a situation which currently obtains.
Along with Ms. Teixeira were seven other Councillors who held membership in the ruling party at the time. Of those eight PPP members, six were PPP parliamentarians. Yet the university became a dying ember under Ms. Teixeira’s government. I ask in all sincerity; what can this woman tell the diaspora conference about UG? But more importantly, why does her party want to control Guyana again in 2020?
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
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