Diwali, FITUG and Guyana’s permanent circus

Nov 13, 2012 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When I was small my mom took me to see the circus. I can’t remember if it was called “Circo Romano,” I think so. I have to be careful because if I make a mistake with my dates, I see long letters in the papers analysing my psychology.
Remember I wrote I saw a movie, “Jesus Christ Superstar” at Astor Cinema and got the year wrong. This guy wrote a long letter showing that my intention to put the incorrect year was deliberate because I was up to some political mischief.
Of course the gentleman didn’t put his real name to his correspondence because most of the people who know him would have asked why cannot a human being make a genuine mistake.
And last week Neil Kumar, Director of Sports said something is mentally wrong with me because I confused a date I wrote about in the seventies. He was referring to the same movie. Can you imagine, a columnist’s psychology is called into question because he typed in a wrong date? This is the permanent circus I referred to in my caption above.
Anyway, to make a long story short, I think it was “Circo-Romano” but I could be wrong. I saw that circus when I was very small and still remember that priceless moment with my mom. Didn’t go many places with her after then because of my parents’ necessity to work to maintain a large family (why do poor people get so many children?) The circus was great but the jokers stood out.
Little did I know that after that day the circus would take up permanent occupation in my country.
Whenever Diwali comes around, the circus comes into in my head, when I am about to do a column on this particular holiday. One old Hindu priest becomes the joker. A notorious pursuer of underage girls throughout his religious career, he makes sure he tells the Diwali revelers that their religion is Hinduism and their god is the PPP. Last year he even used the occasion to urge the celebrating Hindus to vote for the PPP. But it didn’t work.
This old, jaded, faded womanizer was rejected by Berbicians (he’s not from Berbice and doesn’t live in Berbice so I am not referring to a Berbician Hindu priest). He must have known that his religious influence is dead.
First seven percent of the Berbice electorate didn’t vote and of the fifty three percent that did, they chose Moses Nagamotoo over this moribund, Hindu priest who was responsible for the suicide of an innocent young girl.
Every year when Diwali comes around I wonder how Hindus can have this priest around them. Is it because birds of feather flock together or they just could be bothered with his useless presence? Where is the light in their hearts when they see this man preaching to them? Isn’t this a circus?
The circus is indeed a permanent fixture on our political landscape. Last week the circus went to the Princess Hotel. There gathered for the feast was an ironic group called FITUG. It is indeed an amazing paradox. FITUG was born as a trade union umbrella to fight State-sponsored attacks on trade union rights and to confront a government that was not supportive of workers’ pockets.
Now a group of trade unions has taken up a supporting role to an anti-working class government and has adopted the same name. So yesterday FITUG was anti dictatorship. Today, FITUG is pro-dictatorship.
You want to hear more of the circus in Guyana? Well the man who gave the feature address to the FITUG congress at the Princess Hotel is ninety year old Ashton Chase who authored the first book on a history of trade unions in this country. That was when the colonials were in charge of us and Mr. Chase was an “anti-colonial fighter.”
Now he is a strong supporter of a government that by no stretch of the imagination can be called a friend of the working class.
It just goes to show you what type of people we had fighting for our independence. Did they really care about the rights of workers or did they want to kick the colonials out so they could have had his power and his mansion? Chase appears as a funny man to me. He tried a few months ago, through his client Juan Edghill, to commit me to prison for contempt of court. It was an ignominious failure for this so-called trade unionist.
The judge threw out his motion

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Diwali, FITUG and Guyana’s permanent circus

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