The opposition must tell every PPP voter about Ms. Jo Yeates

Jan 21, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There is no question in my mind – the combined opposition can win the forthcoming national elections and secure a two-thirds parliamentary advantage. Winning elections are about a cluster of important characteristics of which three I will elaborate on.
The reality of life and nature is that the presence of personality plays a big role in human relations.
Who you are, how you look, how you talk, how you come across, how you reason, how you intellectualize are crucial ingredients in the melting pot. There is no question about it – the personality of Barack Obama is simply irresistible. Put a charismatic figure against a boring candidate and the latter will lose the election
Secondly, the opposition must put as much emphasis on the incumbent’s failure as they place on their own framework for the future. Citizens are as much interested in the mistakes of the incumbent as they are about the plans of the opposition.
Thirdly, the opposition must select the most heart-breaking insensitivities of the incumbent and present them in graphically devastating ways to the citizenry. In Guyana, fear of being the victim of a violent crime is on the mind of every Guyanese. But more importantly it is the ease with which criminals can get away and the absence of police competence that frightens the Guyanese people.
In Guyana, we must have one of the world’s most unsolved crime files. This is a gold mine for the opposition and they must not drive home the point with semantics and rhetoric only. They must use visual image. The face of Ms Jo Yeates in the UK must feature in the forthcoming elections.
Get large posters of the smiling face of this woman, murdered in the UK and show PPP voters how incompetent is the party they voted for in 2001 and 2006. Prior to December 17, no one in Britain knew who Ms. Yeates was. She was just an ordinary citizen without any prominence in her country
On December 17, she disappeared.
Then eight days later (on Christmas Day), her body was found. From thereon, the British police have mounted an operation that makes one think that a member of the royal family was attacked. At the moment there is a huge DNA operation going on in the neighbourhood where Ms. Yeates lived.
In her back yard, the forensic experts have turned the place into a battle field. Yesterday, a 32-year-old man, a neighbour of Ms. Yeates, was arrested on suspicion of murdering her. Police subsequently cordoned off the road where the victim resided.
Why are the police treating Ms. Yeates’ investigation so meticulously? The answer is that this is the way professional police operate. The British police did not treat Ms. Yeates with special eyes. They would have done the same in any other homicide. This is called police professionalism.
Guyana is a country where life is cheap, perhaps as on the same level in countries where victims are cruelly extirpated as part of the nihilism of civil war. The voters who put the PPP back in power must understand that at the heart of Guyana’s criminal, violent vortex is political incompetence.
We are drowning in blood, but the PPP leaders in the Government of Guyana have refused a British offer to modernize the police force because they don’t want the presence of Scotland Yard personnel at Eve Leary.
The police in Trinidad and Jamaica have British officers working with the local police hierarchy. Why the PPP has done this? Because once the UK guys come, they will see how incompetent their local counterparts are. They will see the interference of the politicians that has reduced the police force to a farce.
The combined opposition must put the face of Sheema Mangar next to Jo Yeates and appeal to PPP voters to reject the madness they have put into power in Guyana. I hope when the AFC was campaigning in Bath Settlement last week they explained to the citizens there the politics behind police incompetence.
I met Sheema Mangar’s father last year at the Women Against Domestic Abuse rally at the GCC and in no uncertain terms I told him that he and his wife could prevent more victims like their daughter by voting the PPP out of office. Everywhere I go, I sing this mantra to the victims of violence.
The police cannot solve horrendous homicides that occur daily in this country but they can confiscate the truck of a driver who merely transported protesting school children.
They can lock up street vendors and keep them overnight in the uncivilized Brickdam lock-up. PPP voters must open their eyes before it is too late.