Freddie Kissoon - Oh, this country!

Freddie Kissoon – Oh, this country!

May 16, 2008 Freddie Kissoon

A police van turned up with personnel dressed in bullet-proof vests and big guns. Alongside the lawmen was a pick-up with GPL officials. No, it wasn’t a case of an enraged family that violently chased GPL crew out of the vicinity. No, it wasn’t a confrontation between citizens of a depressed community and GPL technicians over illegal connections. No, it wasn’t a situation where GPL crew was being prevented from effecting a disconnection at a popular night spot.

The GPL that seldom finds time to come to your rescue even if the wire is sparking in front of your home suddenly found a 4X4 and a group of technicians to go to a citizen’s home in Bachelor’s Adventure. The police were summoned too. What was the crime? The citizen had done his patriotic duty and installed a street lamp in front of his home using the GPL wires. Obviously, security was on his mind.

The GPL claimed he breached bureaucratic procedures by not seeking permission from the utility company.
Well, alright. One has to live with bureaucracy in this country. But why was he invited to the police station at Vigilance. He did not commit a crime. If he didn’t solicit the approval of the GPL, then GPL personnel should have had a form on hand and had him fill in the necessary details.

This particular person was doing two positive things at the same time. He was providing for the security of his family in one of the most crime-infested countries in the Americas. Secondly, he did his civic duty and provided a street lamp that the Government of Guyana should have installed on his street.

Since the incident, GPL has informed the public that it is giving citizens permission for them to place light on the streets where they live. Now here is an interesting observation about class structure in the post-colonial world. Bachelor’s Adventure certainly cannot be classified as a well-to-do or middle class suburb. Using any economic criterion, it can be classified as a working class rural village.
Now go to any urban upper-class suburb in Georgetown and you will see street lights – Oleander Gardens, Bel Air Park, Bel Air Springs, Courida Park, Lamaha Gardens, Prashad Nagar and Atlantic Gardens among others. But people from less wealthy areas of Guyana who desperately need security have to prove for their own street illumination.

Don’t forget; don’t ever forget that the party that runs Guyana has in its constitution that it is guided by Marxism-Leninism. That is an ideology that is designed to enhance the role of the lower classes in the relations of production in the socialist system.
Long ago, in many of my columns for both the Stabroek News and the Kaieteur News, I wrote that if you can show me a communist in the PPP, I will point you to the country and the house where Adolf Hitler is hiding out. Shouldn’t street lights be a provision of the district council or local municipality or the central government?

Why in a country that can host international events like CWC 2007 and CARIFESTA, citizens have to buy their own bulbs for the roadways where they live? Why are they paying taxes?

The absence of streets lamps in many districts in Georgetown makes this country appear primitive in the eyes of visitors and we are 42 years old as an independent person. One wonders what went through the mind of Forbes Burnham when he engineered Carifesta Avenue and didn’t light it up. It is a vital artery that connects Georgetown to the East Coast.

Knowing Burnham’s emphasis on modernization, it had to be a very insurmountable problem. I believe funds ran out. I have written several times on this page that if Burnham had the prodigious foreign aid that the PPP is currently getting, he would have done better in terms of infrastructural facilities.

Many Guyanese may not have seen it but the famous British newspaper, the Guardian (UK), carried the report last week of its ecology writer who is on a tour of South America. She wrote that she visited the National Park in Guyana and it was in a rundown state. This is twenty-three years after Burnham died.
You are forced to ask what the government does with the money it gets in aid. I visit the National Park almost on a daily basis and have continued to lament in my columns on its deteriorating conditions. But I got the shock of my life when two weeks ago, I found out that its head was recently given a prestigious posting.

So CARIFESTA is coming. Will Georgetown streets be outfitted with street lamps at last? One pathway that desperately needs them is Saffon Street where Kaieteur News is located. As soon as you leave Kaieteur News going north, there are no lights. More than ten times over the years I have seen the hooligans using the darkness there to brutalize the pavement sleepers just for fun. But Monday night was horrible.

Senior Reporter Dale Andrews and I had to shout at the top of our voices to scare these sadistic creatures. They beat a pavement dweller so savagely that I doubt he will live. It was a really horrible sight to see what those six uncivilized youths did to that fellow.

Remember Anthony Burgess celebrated novel, “A Clockwork Orange.” on that exact madness. Well Dale and I saw what Burgess wrote about on Monday evening.