Juxtapositions

Sep 28, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In every election campaign, the PPP bought PR skills from foreign organizations. The ideas and strategies served absolutely (I stress the adverb) no purpose. The perennial ethnic census accompanied every national contest after and including the 1992 election. In the last outing, the PPP received fewer votes than in 2001.
And the traditional pattern continued where huge chunks of the South Georgetown electorate did not turn up at the polls. The PR people from abroad did not help the PPP to win. The PPP won in the same way it did in all previous electoral encounters.
The so-called PR wizards are coming again. What has the combined opposition got to throw at the PPP in the 2011 contest? The key in the campaign will be the art of juxtapositions. The combined opposition has to show what the PPP leaders and sycophants have as against what the majority of the Guyanese people don’t.
I suggest they start with the Champion of the Earth award that Mr. Jagdeo got from the UN. Show the people who come to the rallies, Mr. Jagdeo receiving his prize and what the city of Georgetown looks like.
This is one of the most powerful symbols of failed government in the colonial and post-colonial history of this land. If I ever complete a book on politics in Guyana I will definitely conclude that the UN honour remains the most ironic moment in this country’s history.
It is not that the President left us with a rotting capital in the last year of his rule, but throughout his tenure which began in 1999. It is not that the city of Georgetown has episodic moments of mountains of stink garbage. The nation’s capital has been sunk in a vortex of miasma throughout the reign of Mr. Jagdeo.
The juxtaposition should also extend to the alleyways. How can the UN give this man that honour when his policies are anti-environment? The simple engineering principle is that rainwater has to find an outlet to the sea or an outlet somewhere. The people of Georgetown should never forgive Mr. Jagdeo for the state in which he left Georgetown. Most, if not all the alleys, have been overrun by jungle.
A few hours of hard rain leaves Georgetown – including its inner, commercial parts – dreadfully inundated. There are graphic photos from the newspapers about this disaster that the opposition can get and juxtapose them against a smiling Champion of the Earth.
This election campaign cannot and must not avoid the act of bringing into people’s focus the stench and the miasma of Georgetown. Not even a city that has endured the ravishes and destruction of war is as dirty as Guyana’s capital city of Georgetown.
Guyanese are divided as to the saddest eyesore of the PPP’s years in power – police breakdown, the crime madness, permanent blackouts, continuing poverty, rundown infrastructure , the filth of Georgetown. Surely, the last one takes us closer to the absence of civilization.
No politician who has been part of the Government of Guyana the last ten years should be viewed positively by this nation’s electorate after what Georgetown has become.
Food for the Poor built a home for the widow (she has six children) of the security guard who was shot to death when former Agriculture Minister Sash Sawh was murdered. That house is photographed in the newspapers. How about showing the Guyanese electorate that structure with the majestic mansions going up in Pradoville 2? How about telling the Guyanese electorate that this is how the State treated that man. They couldn’t even provide his family with a modest home.
These graphic juxtapositions will outmatch any innovation that the PR gurus will come up with.
The election comes at the right time. There are vivid scenes in the two independent dailies of broken down schools in districts where those are the only schools, thus the children have no alternative avenues of learning.
In most instances the toilet facilities are absent. I recently saw one such photograph of a school in Friendship in this newspaper. It is going to take money to get these juxtapositions printed and distributed in large numbers, but it is a priceless election campaign strategy on which the opposition must embark.
The imagination has to be torn apart when one sees graphic images of the mansions going up in Pradoville 2 and the types of houses poor people live in. How about a photograph of the 200 million American dollars failure in Skeldon and that humongous CLICO building on Camp Street that has become a vivid, ironic reminder of the destruction of a country?

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Juxtapositions

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