Please let there be no Carifesta death tonight!

Aug 30, 2008 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

You don’t try to hurry home on Guyana’s roads. It is a dangerous thought. However, I did not want to miss the acceptance speech of Barack Obama on Thursday evening. I will get back to Obama, but let me reflect on one aspect of civilization here.

None of the traffic lights were working along the East Bank last Thursday evening. In this country life is a routine of stress. This is stressland.

You have a huge international event running for more than a week, common sense could tell anyone that the traffic would multiply geometrically.

The police have to know that. The Ministry of Works has to know that. The Office of the President must know that.

The second most dangerous junction for potential fatality after the Vlissengen Road/ Carifesta Avenue/East Coast Highway is the Eccles Garden/East Bank Highway.

Death lurks at these places every second. Coming in third is Mandela Avenue as it meets West Ruimveldt at Industrial Site. A country should not be recognized as a modern state if it cannot have working traffic lights.

Thursday evening there was a mammoth attendance at a gospel concert at the National Stadium as part of Carifesta.

The East Bank Highway was inundated with metal. Tonight, one of the world’s top singers, Akon, will perform. Unfortunately, some drivers may die if the traffic bulbs go off.

I am not a fan of Akon but I know he has superstar status. That performance is going to bring out so many young people that the East Bank Highway will buckle under the weight of the countless vehicles that will mash it up. Some order could be maintained if the traffic lights work.

The formula is based on common sense. A person is not going to go through the red light to get to the stadium if dozens of cars are going through the green light.

But if there are no lights, many drivers will try to push their way through. This happened to me on Thursday night at Industrial Site.

None of the lights at the three confluences I mentioned were working. I came close to being struck at Industrial Site.

I never saw such fear in my daughter’s face before and she lived through the post-election violence of 1997 and 2001 when we were caught in the vortex in down town Georgetown.

I wonder if I can ask David Dabydeen, Guyana’s UNESCO Ambassador, to have a quiet word with his hosts and ask them to have our traffic lights working. Back to Obama.

Barack Obama’s speech was wonderful. It is such a tragedy that our young President Bharrat Jagdeo could not have been a Third World Obama.

I hope Mr. Jagdeo saw the flow of this charismatic man that may be the person of the 21st century. We don’t know how he may turn out.

But one cannot help feeling the embrace for Obama. I know, however, politics is a serpentine game marked by eerie manoeuvres of deadly betrayal.

Robert Mugabe received all our love and generosity when he was a freedom fighter. Today Mugabe is a nasty dictator. Benazir Bhutto turned out to be a horribly corrupt leader who truly deserved to have been given a life sentence in jail for plundering the resources of her poor country.

One of the most tragic descents into nasty, autocratic, destructive politics anywhere in the world is our own PPP in Guyana.

No one, not a single person in this world could have believed what the PPP, with someone like Janet Jagan with a superb record from the fifties, would have turned out to be. This was a party with a large positive image around the world from 1968 to 1997.

Today, this organization, which forms the Government of Guyana, except for brutal dictatorships in Zimbabwe, Myanmar, is an extremely corrupt, extremely incestuous and deeply authoritarian regime that has no international credibility and which may fall after the Roger Khan trial. Against that backdrop, one should be cautious about Obama, though we want him to win.

I hope he does not disappoint us but if he does, I will not be surprised. Politics is slimy business. Mr. Obama electrifies his listeners. I love the part when he pontificated on the value of education.

He said he and his wife would not have been at the convention if it wasn’t for education. He sees a large role for government in providing an education for its people.

It is this aspect of life in Guyana that one should not forgive the PPP Government for. I wrote this about President Jagdeo in my column yesterday and I am repeating it. The state of tertiary education in this land is an incomprehensible tragedy.