Pushing what at what speed and how far?

Dec 12, 2010 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In Friday’s column, I made a brief criticism of a presidential address to the attendees at the opening of the newly-built Port Mourant market. I reproduced the following words;
“We have to play catch up that is why we need to push every single day to make things work.” The brevity of that commentary took away from the essential points I wanted to adumbrate. Today’s opinion is an extension of Friday’s column.
It would be most fascinating if Government’s spokespersons could tell us what is meant by these words; “That is why we need to push every single day to make things work.”
What are we pushing? The answer is hardly anything. We remind readers of the context of the pushing statement. The Head of State told the market vendors that Guyana lost precious time under the PNC which set the country back by the years the PNC has been in power. He put the number at 30 years.
The leadership of the PPP has a deep psychic problem or extremely dishonest people. It is either they have an intense mental blockage, in that at the conscious level they are not aware that they have determined the shape of Guyana for eighteen years now, or they know this but mask it with lies and ignorance. This 30-year-old PNC setback is elephant dung and the electorate, especially young voters, must reject it.
In 1979, balance of payment problems began to devastate Guyana. The rut lasted until 1988 when President Hoyte began to reshape Burnham’s economy. By 1991, the turnaround began to move. In 1992 the PNC lost power. From 1979 to 1991, the PNC had no foreign exchange to manage the economy.
In its 18 years of hegemony, the resources at the disposal of the PPP Government have been in the area of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. At the end of 2010, the Guyana Revenue Authority’s target will be G$94 billion. The PNC never saw that kind of money. But it ran Guyana with skills that have surpassed what the PPP Government has at the moment.
Here is a graphic example of it. I was in the High Court on Wednesday morning for the President’s libel against me and this newspaper. While waiting in the gallery, I approached a judge who was talking to Mark Benschop.
Here is an interesting conversation which consisted of nothing new and was in fact commonsense at work. Here is a graphic demonstration of the PPP Government pushing nothing but nonsense and stupidity over the past 18 years.
The judge said that in 1960 when there were twelve judges, you could have counted on your fingers the number of persons who were charged for murder.
He said it was probably one. In that very time, he went on, you could have counted how many persons made claims in civil court. In 2010, fifty years after, the number of murder cases is in the hundreds and you have to take a calculator to count the cases in civil dispute.
Here is the nightmarish part. Guyana has ten High Court judges plus three in the Court of Appeal. Do you want more evidence of instead of pushing Guyana into the future the PPP is pushing us into the past?
As a boy growing up in Wortmanville, we would lime on D’urban Street and jot down car numbers. At that time, you could have counted the number of cars in Georgetown. In those days, a small cottage at the junction of Smyth and Princes Streets named, the Licence Revenue Office, registered vehicles.
Decades after my boyhood days, there are now maybe a hundred thousand vehicles in the capital city but the same small house remains the site where you go to get your car licence.
So what is the difference then and now? Chaos, madness and stupidity. The little house and the two streets cannot cope with the changes that a modern Guyana has brought.
What is this Government pushing? The answer is that they have pushed commonsense out the window. In 1950, the retirement age for public servants including policemen and teachers was 55. That was sixty years ago.
Today, the World Bank has informed us that over 80 percent of our educated citizens migrate. The retirement age is still 55 and we are in the 21st century.
Visit Georgetown, look at the alley-ways and gutters then tell us what the Government is pushing. Funny! We are right in front of the Atlantic Ocean. That is where they are pushing us.

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