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Is the “white man” better than us?

Jun 23, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Go to any non-white country that was a former colony of the European empires and say out loudly that Third World people are of inferior quality to white Europeans and white Americans and you would probably get some dangerous stares.
Depending on the particular country, you may even get assaulted. Yet there are scholars in the world that believe that colonialism has permanently damaged the psyche of its colonial subject. Two Caribbean giants didn’t put it that way but they certainly think that colonial subjects were tragic figures – CLR James and Franz Fanon.
After sixty years of Independence, you cannot find one dark-skinned person among the hundreds of top Bollywood stars.
Even in sports, there is no one in the Indian cricket team that is dark-skinned as Chris Gayle or Darren Sammy or Jerome Taylor. Yet when you look at India there are hundreds of millions of citizens who are certainly not light in complexion.
In contrast, some of the superstars in both sports and entertainment in the US, France and the UK are as black as me and Adam Harris. In India, skin-lightening cream is a profitable industry. VS Naipaul has a false Oxford accent and the world knows it.
Only Ravi Dev in Guyana sees nothing wrong on the part of Naipaul’s character in adopting a false “white man” accent (see his exchange with me on the subject about five years ago).
The Third World lags behind the Europeans and Americans in the creation of comforts that make civilization more workable and enjoyable. Why should any citizen respect certain Caricom Governments when their leaders are happy to have the white man in London be the final arbiter in our court disputes? They want the Privy Council to be the region’s final appeal avenue.
Europe and the US were the first states to remove public smoking. In Guyana, we are still to do so. It is just over a year, Guyana brought in radar guns for speeding. Just the other day, we banned talking on the mobile phone while driving.
Take the GRA road vehicle licence. It cannot work. It has not been working. It will not work. The answer is commonsense. Maybe when the white man left he took our commonsense from us. The fault is not the Guyana Revenue Authority’s but the people who administer the government in Guyana.
Commonsense should instruct all Guyanese living here that there are no brutal, humiliating lines for police vehicle fitness and car insurance.
For all the years, I have purchased car insurance, there was never a line? You will be arrested by the police if you do not have fitness certificate and insurance.
What is the answer? Because these things have no national deadline, only individual deadline.  So mine is up in December, yours in January, etc. The same with insurance.
What the government has done is to create one particular deadline for all vehicles in the entire country. It is normally the end of May. The result then is that thousands of persons have to be in a queue. The strain on the GRA is horrifyingly tremendous.
There is a commonsensical way out. The Government will not do away with the road license because it brings in money. I agree with its existence
What can be done is to make its sale a daily process. To get fitness, just as you have to produce your registration, you have to show the road licence. So when your fitness is up, you go to the GRA and buy the document. No GRA paper, no fitness certificate.
Do the same thing with insurance. On the purchase of your insurance, you have to tender the GRA licence. The insurance cannot be sold unless you produce your road licence.
Another model that could be contemplated is to change the format and let the document last for three years.
People will have to find more money but it does away with those nauseating lines and the humiliation people have to go through. The sale by the GRA of road license is going to break down again next year because you are asking too many thousands of persons to meet a single deadline.
I doubt that the madness will go away next year and for one reason – we do not have the vision to invent thoughts and ideas that make civilization more tolerable in this land.
Finally, and for the umpteenth time on this page, I ask the question – what is it in the chemistry and psychology of our leaders that they cannot get the traffic signals to function?

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