A clock whose hands go anti-clockwise

May 17, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My daughter went to St. Agnes Nursery School on Church Street inside the compound of St. Rose’s High School. At that time, I didn’t have a car. I used to fetch her on my shoulders and when we reached the junction of North Road and Camp Street, I walked off the pavement onto Camp Street just to avoid the fetid mess that was always on the pavement.

The huge pile of garbage on that section of the little pavement along Camp Street between Church Street and North Road, is avoided by all the school kids and pedestrians.
This was a long time ago. My kid is going to be 20 years in November. I pass that junction everyday and I look at the garbage that is still there, and I reflect back over the twenty years on how time stands still in this country.

Here I am; twenty years after moving off the pavement to avoid that nastiness, it is still there. How can any sensible human being live in this country over those 20 years and see progress. Where is the progress? What is progress? The clock does not move in Guyana. But some believe that it does. They have their reason for sprouting such propaganda. They cite some fancy buildings going up all over Georgetown. We will come to that debate below.

In 1990, I asked the then Canadian High Commissioner to address my International Relations students on Canada’s foreign policy in the Third World. Lectures were conducted in certain makeshift classrooms during the transfer of UG to Turkeyen. All students referred to them as “The Stables.”
All Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences students from 1972 to the present time were educated in The Stables. The Stables are very much alive and have been alive since 1972. As the diplomat walked towards the classroom, he undiplomatically yelled out, “God, this place is dirty.”

He was referring to the mountain of garbage he saw on the perimeters of The Stables. That was eighteen and a half years ago. The Stables are still home to the most important lectures in the Social Sciences Faculty. The ocean of garbage still surrounds The Stables. Does civilization go forward in Guyana?
Imagine what will go through the mind of that diplomat if he were to return to The Stables to give a lecture. He definitely would not accept that life can be so immobilized in any country in the world. So is there progress? Yes there is. There is a very attractive mall with an escalator right in the heart of the city.
What about Buddy’s International Hotel at Providence? That is nice too. I regard Nigel’s Supermarket as being on par with any Caribbean supermarket.

So is that how we measure progress? Can we say that the substance of Guyana is in fancy hotels and modern supermarkets? Is that where you locate the fabric of a nation? Is that how you measure progress? What about the other side of midnight? How about what goes through the minds of all those nursery kids like my daughter who after twenty years still see filth on the pavement at North Road and Camp Street?

How do citizens who knew that back in the eighties the public schools didn’t have teachers, feel today? It is worse in 2009. No school is exempted. What about the tyranny of darkness that a public corporation brought into your daily life from 1983 onwards when Guyana had no balance of payment credits and aid had dried up? The houses in Georgetown endured blackouts for twelve hours each day.

From 1983 to 2009 that gives you a total of twenty-six years. Yet in 2009 the state owned newspaper publishes a schedule of blackouts. This is twenty-five years after the collapse of that corporation named Guyana Electricity Corporation. All over Guyana, the talk is that this very corporation under a new name and under a new government has collapsed. Where I live I see how the clock works. I see the pavement filth everyday I drive on North Road but I also get daily blackouts.

So where is the progress? I grew up as a boy hearing about the years it takes to have a case concluded in the courts. I have a close friend who is waiting for more than twelve years to get judgement for a property he owns in Kitty.
What has changed in Guyana when in 1982 everyone was afraid of the Maximum Leader? That was Forbes Burnham. Today there is a new Burnham and the fear is still there. That is progress!