Women’s Lawyers Association, diaspora and clowns: The dead live in Guyana

Jul 16, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

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Kaieteur News – I walk my dog almost daily at the Georgetown seawall, the National Park, the spacious parapet at Giftland and the sprawling compound of Massy Supermarket; I live very close to the last two structures.
A few years ago, I just developed this irresistible habit of letting the dog off the leash while I stare intensely at people. I look at them with perplexed eyes. So preoccupied at staring at them, sometimes my dog would wonder off. In the vortex of my intensity, I would ask myself the question all the time; “who are these people, what really is the Guyanese nationality?”
I would pick my dog up, leave the National Park, the seawall, Giftland and Massy Supermarket with the swirling emotionalism of resignation and the traumatism of psychic vacuum. I am a part of this philosophical detritus known to the world as the Guyanese nationality. The next day, my dog and I begin the cycle all over.
So who are the dead that are living in Guyana and who are the asinine people in a never-ending circus in a land known to the world as Guyana? To see the dead and the clowns you have to read two letters published in two daily newspapers. One is written by the former mayor of New Amsterdam, Mr. Sheik Deen – Kaieteur News, July 3.
Deen laments the dystopian reality that the replacement of lost ID card is almost impossible to procure. He asserts that in other countries, a lost card can be easily replaced. He went on to add that in Guyana, you can only secure another ID card when national elections are due or when GECOM goes on a national registration campaign.
I haven’t researched it so I don’t know if what Mr. Deen is saying is factual but I have lived long in Guyana to know it is a country where the most backward values the world left behind hundreds of years ago are the norm here. An ID card in Guyana is a matter of life and death. If the President or the US Ambassador send you with an official letter head to the bank saying you are Michael Black, working with the president or the ambassador, all the commercial banks will tell you – “let the President and the US Ambassador go to hell, bring me an ID card.”
The other letter is written by a woman whose name is real because she has published letters before. Carried in the June 25 edition of the Stabroek News, Narissa Deokarran said she was refused entry into the Region Four administration office because her dress was sleeveless. If you think you are reading comic book stuff, then re-read the letter. It is about a country in the 21st century.
Enter David Granger. This man was the most pathetic government head in the history of the CARICOM Region. I doubt CARICOM will produce another jejune, head of government like Granger. As president, Granger gave an interview with the Chronicle in which he denounced the ban on women entering public buildings wearing a sleeveless dress.
Granger never had his government issue a proclamation. Granger never sent out an edict to public institutions requesting them to remove that archaic dress code. Granger may have been an arid president with no leadership qualities. But he perhaps is not as silly as an organisation named the Women’s Lawyer Association (WLA).
That school of clowns knows that the ban is a violation of a woman’s constitutional right. You cannot prevent a woman from accessing justice by imposing a sartorial anachronism on her. But it happens in a banana republic name Guyana.
The WLA never issued even a sentence of condemnation of this asinine imposition. The WLA never sought to test the matter in court. What about the Guyanese diaspora? They extol their talent and wealth and promise to come and save the wretched of the earth that lives in Guyana. But that is all they talk about – the money they have to invest and the training they have that should land them lucrative employment.
The diaspora folks know that this is a horribly backward country where traffic signals do not work; street lights do not work; the banks are sadistic to lower income customers; the replacement of an ID card is impossible; a phone call to most public institution is never answered; the Guyana Livestock Development Authority kill your puppy at Ogle airport once you cannot prove it is born in Guyana; GPL does come when summoned, the Fire Service comes alright but after the inferno begins, etc, etc, etc. But the diaspora never raises these insanities with the power establishment or even expose them in the newspapers.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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