Time was lost. Time is still being lost

Dec 10, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Last year, after reading some propagandistic letters from Clement Rohee about 28 years of PNC misrule, I predicted that the PPP’s election campaign will revolve around the contents of the PNC stewardship back then.
Unable to galvanize their supporters with an impressive record in its nineteen-year-old governorship, the PPP will carp and carp about the sins of the PNC from 1968 to 1992. The strategy is to drive fear in the rural East Indian.
Speaking at the opening of the Port Mourant market last Thursday, President Jagdeo gave us a snippet of what the campaign platform will be like. The attendees were told that Guyana lost three decades under the PNC and Guyana has to play catch up.
Here are the actual words; “We have lost so much time. We have to play catch up. This is why we need to push every single day to make things work.”
One’s first reaction to the Berbice speech is that things were not as bad in the PNC 30 years as was painted for the listeners. Some obvious facts are as glaring as the perennial grass.
From 1964, under the leadership of Mr. Burnham and his deputy, Peter D’Aguiar, income disparities were nowhere near as disastrous as they are now. In the seventies, Guyana built a better bridge over the Demerara River than what we got in the 21st century from the PPP over the Berbice River. Water was free. Tertiary education was free. Electricity rates were not the highest in the hemisphere.
Instead of providing more examples, a wiser course is to show those Berbicians where we have come since 1992. It will be nineteen years of PPP rule next year. Are we still catching up after 18 years of PPP power? By any stretch of the imagination, 18 years is a long time for one organization to be in control of a country.
Does a government need more than 18 years to provide electricity to a land of only 700,000 persons? And even in its capital city it cannot sustain a constant supply of current. Does a government need more than 18 years to provide modern toilet facilities and furniture to its schools even in the capital city?
Let me digress to a personal experience under those 30 years of PNC rule. My mom slipped down her steps and badly messed up her angle which had separated from the rest of right foot. We rushed her to the Georgetown Public Hospital where she was urgently admitted without any long wait. Her heart began to give way and immediately she was transferred to the intensive care unit. This was in 1985.
At that time, I was a relentless critic of the PNC. In my heart I say without any bias that the Georgetown Hospital offered a better service then than in the 21st century under a PPP administration.
Last Monday, I took my nephew to the medical clinic section of the Georgetown Public Hospital. Unfortunately given the nightmare that one endures there, I had to use a contact to see the doctor. We were told to be at his office at 8 A.M. The goodly doctor turned up at 10.00 hours. We saw him before hundreds of others.
That was not right and maybe I should apologize. Had I not use a connection, my nephew would have spent more than six hours to see him. We were told to get an X-ray and a blood test. When I looked at the queue for the X-ray patients, I know my nephew wasn’t coming out at that hospital until sundown.
I took him to a private clinic for the test and the X-ray.
When we went back, the goodly doctor had gone. I was told we can only see him again one week from the date we first entered his office. If there is any unsatisfactory public medical institution in the world, it is the Georgetown PublicHospital. It is truly one of the world most irritating hospitals. Just to look at the way poor people are reduced to animals at that institution makes you psychologically traumatized.
This tragedy has nothing to do with lost time during the reign of the PNC. To understand why the medical institution is like this read the Auditor-General’s report. If time was lost during the domination of the PNC, more time has eroded under the hegemony of the present regime. We are going back to primitive caves.
I saw with my own two eyes how a vital educational institution was virtually destroyed by those who now criticize the PNC.

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