Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jul 10, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
One of the essential rules of psychology and definitely of life that the PPP Government will never see even until the day that party disappears is that if a human being or a group of closely knitted persons shut out reality and fool themselves, they will never achieve anything because they do not live in the real world.
Any psychology professor will tell you that one has to face reality and deal with its harshness. To postpone that decision means you are forever going to retain the present fictions that you accept and they become the quintessence of your existence.
These words are an introduction to the comical situation the Government of Guyana finds itself in with the ICC Twenty/20 international tournament next year. The PPP, beginning with its flawed founder, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, never lived in the world of objective truths. The PPP leaders always had their own subjective truths. One of their subjective truths is that Guyana is a magnificent place that the PPP has developed this past seventeen years and we are as good as any other country and we should be proud of it. That is nowhere near the truth. In fact it is appalling nonsense.
For those who are in charge of the government, maybe they honestly believe that. They are angry when you tell them that we are somewhere near a 10th grade nation.
What PPP leaders cannot and will not understand is that if you accept that you are at the bottom of the ladder, then you will desperately try to reach the top. If you are not at the top and you believe you are sitting at the apex, you are only fooling yourself.
Every Guyanese who knows Freddie Kissoon will associate me with criticizing UG. I wrote so much about that place that I should leave it to others now. Over the past two decades I spoke of the decline. But each time I wrote that, the UG administration would shout that Guyana has a university as good as any. We all know what that self-fooling brought. It is the same thing on the national level.
While New Zealand and South Africa were playing World Cup cricket here their fans chose to stay and have fun in the sun in the Caribbean islands. They didn’t want to come to Guyana. The New Zealand commentator, Ian Smith, actually said that while giving commentaries and Colin Croft took him up.
Why didn’t they come? Because the world knows we are poor and have many, many more miles to get to where our Caribbean neighbours are. If we recognize we are behind we will get there. Our leaders have to stop the game of self-fooling.
They deceive themselves into thinking that we are a modern country. We are not. Our traffic lights do not work. Our streets and roads are hazardous. Our medical services are millions of miles behind Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad. Most, if not all the members of the upper echelons of the political directorate seek medical attention abroad. We are yet to fit out the police force with a fully functioning forensic lab.
Our prestigious high schools are not longer prestigious; they lack teachers and furniture and their toilets are unfit for humans.
Our electricity supply is pathetic. Our sewage system has fallen down. Our economy limps along. Our human resource base gets thinner each day.
No Guyanese wants this. This is our country. We want to see it grow. But it will not become modern if we continue to fool ourselves and tell ourselves that we are glad to have international guests pouring in here to see our lovely modern territory. What they see is going to cause them to run us down.
There has to be a reason why the fans from South African and New Zealand stayed away; why we got shafted by the ICC with the Twenty/20 programme next year; why 82 percent of our university graduates leave; why we are living illegally in some very small countries.
The answer is there. But the PPP leadership cannot see it. They don’t want to see it. If they had seen it, then we could have skipped the Rio Summit, Carifesta, Commonwealth Finance Ministers conference; now Twenty/20 international cricket. And we could have used that money to make us a better country.
The frightening thing about Guyana is that our leaders have already made up their minds that we are a better country. So the farce and the comic book story will continue. We will spend money to bring people here while they laugh at us. There aren’t words to describe the nature of our Government.
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