Latest update April 19th, 2024 12:59 AM
Dec 03, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
Yesterday, I described my encounters with villagers in Providence last Sunday at a meeting called to listen to the grievances the folks there suffered from severe flooding due to a defective koker. One of the attendees of the meeting in criticizing the PPP intoned, “Freddie, after five years you see some lifting of standards, then, it goes higher after ten, but Freddie every year the standards are going down.”
He wanted to know why. This is something every Guyanese that bemoans the backwardness of Guyana says to me. Once the conversation begins, you hear the expected intonation; “Freddie you ain’t seeing improvement.” Guyanese scholars have not answered that question because they feel the answer appears political and they are fearful of being accused of being a biased analyst. Academics who think like that should be civil servants rather than scholars.
What is the answer for the continuous degrading of services, standards and infrastructural decline in this country the past twenty years? There has to be one. The philosopher of the Holy Roman Empire, Saint Thomas Aquinas, wrote that everything in life has an explanation and the answer is God. Karl Marx wrote that life doesn’t have unexplained mysteries. The answer lies in dialectics. The philosophers say life is logical, even evolution followed a logical path.
What then is the answer for the following inexorable abomination? In 1996, to get a passport it took you the entire day of waiting. People felt that the PPP needed a chance because it inherited a weak treasury that President Hoyte begun to strengthen from 1988. In 2014, the identical situation obtains.
In 1996, you had to wait months and months to get a birth certificate. The crowds in the the Post Office building were a deterrent. The reason was the same as in the passport fiasco. In 2014, the identical situation obtains. In 2000, your spirits were immediately daunted when you visited the Lands and Surveys Department to make a transaction. In 2014, the identical situation obtains.
In 2000, the entire UG ambience looked like it was hit by bombing that was more intense than the Allies attack on Dresden in 1945 and the American devastation of Cambodia in 1970. In 2014, UG’s appearance resembles a ghost town. A laboratory in the Faculty of Technology is simply a bare room with dirty things strewn all over the floor.
In 1998, the Georgetown Hospital was a rat-infested stable. Money was simply not there. The PPP’s excuse was that the place was too impoverished over the Burnham years and it would take time for improvement. The lines were endlessly long. Service was horrible. People died in large numbers.
The Georgetown Hospital that my mother died at in 1985 while waiting for treatment is the same institution in 2014. Last week a man beaten by the police died because he lay on his bed at the Georgetown Hospital without receiving treatment for days and he begged his wife to be removed. He was bleeding internally from the beating. In 2014, the reality may be too horrible to contemplate, but you stood a better chance of survival at this hospital in 1980 than in 2014.
In 2000, a magistrate told his court; “I going home and eat hassar curry and watch cricket, I gone.” He left his court in the middle of the session. In 2010, a judge that Roger Khan’s lawyer Robert Simels said goes by the code name, “The Oracle,” refused to hear a writ of habeas corpus over a police detention for a minor traffic offence because it was 4 p.m. and he said he was hungry. Last week, a magistrate used the F-word, the S-word and the term bugger in cussing down a woman that appeared in front of him. The Police Force in 1998 is the same cruel, unprofessional group of misfits in 2014.
What is the answer for the total decline of Guyana over the past twenty years? It will get worse, but our analysts will cringe in using the appropriate concepts. My theory is that the PPP Government refuses to upgrade this country because the PPP is vindictive and resentful at the Guyanese people.
Is this a workable, plausible social science theory – the concept of a vindictive, anti-nationalist ruling political class that views Guyanese people as ingrates who will never give them a landslide victory that they deserve, so they will not spend money on services and infrastructure, and are comfortable with a decayed Guyana?
Do you have an alternative theory? I would like to hear it. I would like to see how you explain the continuous failure of the PPP the past twenty-two years.
Please share this to every Guyanese including your house cats.
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