Repairing Guyana

Nov 11, 2011 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

It must cross the imagination of all Guyanese as to what will be the priorities of the new government that will take office in December 2011. This is a land burdened with unspeakable manifestations of collapse. I repeat what a judge in the High Court corridor remarked to me and Mark Benschop.
He said if you go back and read the newspapers in 1959, you probably had one homicide for that year. Now in 2011, you have dozens (note the plural) in one year. But the High Court has the same number of judges now as it had back then
From 1959 to 2011 is fifty-two years. In case you forget to notice; fifty years is half a century. This is an incredible country. What happened in those fifty-two years to cause us to stagnate so badly? One does not know where the new government is going to get the money from, but prodigious amounts will be needed to bring this country back to normalcy. I don’t know where to start, but my pain lies in the state of Georgetown. I ask the question; even in a country ravished by the state of violent warfare, is the capital is as dirty, disheveled, stink and ugly as Georgetown?
It is not the alleyways in Kingston that are clogged. It is not the alleyways in Charlestown that are mountains of bush. It is the alleyways in the entire territory of Georgetown that are covered with mud and grass that do not allow for the free flow of water. It is not the gutters in Wortmanville that are overflowing with mud. It is not the gutters in Regent Street that look like rivers of mud, it is the gutter and canal network of the entire land mass of Georgetown.
I went to Medicare Pharmacy on New Market Street and parked on the southern parapet, and what I saw in that gutter was truly sickening. This gutter is stacked high with garbage, miasma and mud. How can any capital city be so ravaged in peacetime? I don’t believe any new government will earn the support of the people of Georgetown, if they do not make an attempt to clean the city.
My own feeling is that Le Repentir cemetery is so far gone that the cost of repair will be frighteningly prohibitive. Cutting the grass regularly will not do. The cemetery has to be refurbished.
There must be decent pathways for mourners to pass when they want to bury their loved ones.
I would advise the new administration to re-think the deluge of medical scholarships the Cuban Government offers this country. It is time this programme be examined in critical details. I honestly don’t think those students are properly trained in the science of medicine.
The reason for the absence of any hard-hitting analysis is because no doctor in Guyana wants to do it. There are two truths that one encounters in this country. It is up to each citizen to decide whether he/she accepts it. I have made my decision.
One is that Chinese goods are extremely inferior and should not be bought (I read a news item in this paper about how parents are experiencing horror stories with Chinese school shoes and bags). The other is that Cuban-educated doctors are not well trained at all. Those scholarship programmes are political designs intended to project Cuban solidarity with the Third World.
I wrote about the bias the Cuban Government display in these offers. Not even one percent of the awardees are assigned to universities in Havana and under no circumstances are these foreign students allowed to do their internship at Cuban hospitals.
Politics is one thing, the scientific dimensions of the programmes are another matter. I once wrote that it will not affect the nation if an incompetent sociologist lectures to students. But when a mediocre doctor does an operation, a life can be lost. That is a tragedy that no county can afford.
Since we are on medicine, it would be interesting to see how the new rulers approach the Georgetown Public Hospital. I think that place cries out for modern management systems. That hospital has enormous management problems that have reduced its effectiveness.
More importantly, there seems to be no disciplinary modes that are operational. Even the trainee doctor is his/her own boss. The A&E section of the Georgetown Hospital, in my opinion, has collapsed. Truly, one doesn’t know where to begin if one is to advise the new government where to focus on modernizing this land after decades of destruction.
But we will soon see the picture emerging in a month’s time.

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