I rather line up for bread than see rapists go free and have robbers at my door

Apr 03, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

The main line of both defence and aggression in the PPP’s forthcoming campaign is to return to the era of Forbes Burnham, roughly between 1981 and 1985 and compare Guyana then and now. The pitch will be that things were so bad back then that Guyana is a paradise today.
Guyanese will be urged to remember this when they vote in the elections due very soon. A recent letter in KN, in response to my analysis of modern breakdown in this country, has given us a glimpse of what is to come.
The claims in response to these columns of mine are that I peddle deliberate misconceptions. In fact the defenders of the PPP invent misconceptions, deceptions and deceptiveness of their own. These are so inelegant that they wouldn’t stick during the election campaign.
My home is constantly used as an example. Readers are told that I live in a large house in prime real estate surroundings. What is not mentioned is it was bought through the combined 55 years of work by me and my wife. There is never any outline on the thousands of party kleptomaniacs that build mansions in less than five years of work.
This newspaper highlighted the case of an ordinary clerk whose husband is well placed. The cost of their purchase is $60M. In our combined 55 years of work, I never earned that kind of money and will never. If one follows this logic then why should you not vote for the PPP? After all, a critic like Frederick Kissoon bought and lives in a large house (in fact, it is not). Voters then should ignore the behaviour of the thousands of party kleptomaniacs that are eating up Guyana’s resources because, after all, things are better now.
The PPP campaigners tell us that in the bad days, people lined up for bread and back then there were shortages of so many food items. I cannot see the connection between my assessment of modern breakdown under the PPP and the constant description of the Burnham regime.
I would like to think that as a trained social analyst, my job is to point out to the society the faults of the ruling regime. I would like to think that a voter should judge a government on its track record of power for the nineteen years it has been in control. That government should stand or fall on its balance sheet.
What PPP propagandists are telling Guyanese is that we must forget that sordid 19-year-old record of the PPP and vote with the past in mind because in the past (which is thirty years ago), under the PNC, there were terrible food shortages and other bad things.
If this is their rationalization, it is extremely frightening for two reasons. One is that it gives a blank cheque to the present rulers to do what they want because we have food on our table and in the supermarkets now.
Secondly, in comparing the past and the present, all we will see is a competition for power between a dead regime and a living one. The dead one is Mr. Burnham. The living one is the PPP. The PPP will always win because we must remember what terrible things the dead one did.
This scenario excludes voters judging the incumbents on their performance and shuts out of their minds the fact that there are alternatives to the incumbents that they must commonsensically consider.
For example, why should voters ignore the potential of the Guyana Action Party, the Alliance for Change, Working People’s Alliance, the Independent Party, the renewed, changed PNC to run a better government than the PPP all because decades ago we lined up for bread? What does three decades ago have to do with the horrible 19-year record of the PPP and the need to give other parties a chance to govern the country?
Using another angle, one can reply to the PPP defenders and concede that there were essential shortages under President Burnham. Food is in plentiful supply today. But so are many others things that are as not as nice as food. Guns are everywhere. In today’s Guyana, you may not live to line up for essential items.
One can be robbed and killed at any moment in any place in Guyana. Cocaine is everywhere in this land. So are powerful people who steal public money and molest any woman they want to. Unfortunately for the PPP, the young voter does not know and does not want to know what happened thirty years ago.

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I rather line up for bread than see rapists go free and have robbers at my door

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