Kissing the face of sempiternal evil

Oct 13, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The Kissing Bridge of the Double Day Holiday at Tuschen, East Bank, Essequibo, lay down its troubled self over a small waterway last Saturday after Minister Robeson Benn ordered its demolition. The story of the amorous bridge is the tragic story of the damaged East Indian psyche.
But before we dwell on that, a word about Mae’s Secondary School which has the same implications as the Kissing Bridge for understanding the psychic faults of this race.
I ran a column on Mae’s expulsion of students who were found with cell phones after a mother met me outside the Medicare Pharmacy on New Market Street and told me the mental trauma the family was enduring with the sudden removal of her child.
After she had finished speaking, I asked her a question which I normally put to all Indians, without exception, when they relate their tales of hurt by the Government of Guyana. She told me that she gave her ballot to the PPP but will not do so the next time. I inquired why? She wanted to keep the PNC out.
That was a foolish reply because competing against the PNC at the last general poll was a multi-racial party with lots of Indians in its membership, the Alliance for Change.
This was the identical sentiments Priya Manickchand showed me in her home in 2005 when I requested a comment from her on a story this newspaper was carrying on the weight of a Nisi order from the court carries.
Indians had no excuse in 2006. They are dishonest to themselves to say that they didn’t have a choice. After the publication of my column on the Mae’s expulsions, many other mothers spoke to me. In all the decisions to kick the students out, every parent told me the Minister of Education told them that his Ministry cannot act against Mae’s. This writer was told the same by the Minister.
This is absolutely untrue. I have read the regulations. A student’s eviction from a private school can be stopped by the Ministry. Last week, I got a telephone call from another mother about what the school continues to do when cell phones are discovered on students. My advice to her was to seek an injunction from the courts. In all these cases except one, the parents voted for the PPP in 2006.
What is the connection between the Minister’s refusal to intercede with Mae’s and the troubled bridge that lies over water in Tuschen? Minister Baksh was/is not facing electoral pressure to act to please the parents whose children have been ordered to leave the school in the middle of the school term.
Robeson Benn is not inclined to desist from unpopular policies because he doesn’t accept that the elections will be a competitive process. Both he and Baksh believe the PPP will win. It is just one year before we will have a national election, yet Benn, Baksh, Jagdeo, Manickchand and so many others are in no mood to feel uneasy about losing the forthcoming elections because they are certain of one decisive outcome in this country – Indians will vote for the PPP.
I have seen the Kissing Bridge. Its pulverisation was unnecessary. It was not an obstruction to other citizens. It was not an encumbrance given where it was located. Yet Benn went ahead.
I met one of the family members who owned the Hotel. I did my usual little thing by cynically telling him that he voted for the PPP. The destruction of the KP Thomas Kingston offices did not have to bring about such a violent reaction of the Ministry of Works. But it did.
The Mae’s expulsion, the KP Thomas incident and the Kissing Bridge demolition are the latest contents of a huge tragic tale involving the East Indian people of Guyana (KP Thomas is not an Indian family). Is it right to call a race of people myopic? If it is not, then what description can you apply to these people who cannot see the power they have put in the hands of a morally, intellectually and politically bankrupt political party that they continue to vote into power only to preside over the disappearance of their country.
Are we finally witnessing the end of the marriage between the PPP and the Indian race in Guyana? There is so much evil this party has perpetrated on the people of this little, poor nation since it returned to power in 1992 that every Indian voter should be at the polling station hours before the voting starts to vote them out.
Let’s hope next year, Indians recover their psychic integrity and Guyana will recover too its lost treasure the PPP stole.

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