The PPP will fix Guyana, but…

Feb 22, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I grew up hearing people from all stations in life saying that time really travels. I, myself, can’t believe time can leave you so fast. You look over your shoulder and your friend’s children that were babies in front of your eyes are now women and men. You look around and you wondered how time went by so speedily.
Because time flies you want to fulfill your desires before death comes. You hope you would have achieved more than half the things you set yourself to accomplish. The persons that have all the time in the world are the people in the ruling party in Guyana, the PPP.
This is a group that never fails to make you laugh. The PPP Government announced that it plans to have a national minimum wage. Really, this set of leaders has no parallel in world politics.
This is a party that has proclaimed since its birth in 1947 that its rasion d’etre is the wellbeing of the poorer classes. Its founder, Dr. Jagan, captured the hearts and minds of sugar workers that he promised to lead into the Promised Land.
This same Dr. Jagan called the longest strike in the sugar industry in the seventies over the imposition of a sugar levy but died in office without removing it when he became President. The same pro-working class party scrapped the levy thirteen years after it came to power.
In 2013, more than twenty years after acquiring power in 1992, this “fighter” for working class people, the PPP, says it plans to have a national minimum wage. The obvious question is what was this “fighter” for a working class paradise doing all this time? Whenever I think about Guyana’s stagnation, I remember the creation of the European Union and also my dead friend, Theo Morris; we were contemporaries as UG students. We remained lifelong friends. Theo told me that he was in a plane from the Bahamas and as the flight reached over Guyana, a passenger asked where are the lights? All he saw was darkness.
Forty-six years after Independence, almost ninety percent of the streets in the capital city do not have street lamps. When lights went up on the East Coast highway, I told my wife while we were driving, that give those bulbs five years and after that, darkness will return.
Do you know almost forty percent of those tubes from Vlissengen Road to UG Road have died two years ago? Do you know almost forty percent of traffic signals do not work? Do you know they never functioned at the junction of Albert and Lamaha Streets?
So for over forty-six years after we got Independence, there are hardly any street lamps in Georgetown. Think of what the Europeans have achieved forty-six years after Europe virtually lay in ruin after World War II.
After forty-six years, Europe had retaken its place in the world economy. In 1970, the subway in France was post-modern. This was twenty-five years after WWII. Let’s talk about President Obama. If he had lost re-election, he would still have made a huge entry into the American history books.
In less than four years, he created a national health care system that defied previous American Presidents. One would like to think that Obama said that since time moves quickly and when he looks over his shoulder his term will be up, he made the health care system his priority.
Near to twenty-one years in power, a working class government plans to put in place a national minimum wage. Not to forget that a man with a doctorate and a university professor (Henry Jeffrey) was Minister of Labour for five years.
Not to forget, his consultant also had a doctorate (Nanda Gopaul). So what have they done with their five years and their doctorates at the Ministry of Labour?
What has the great working class PPP Government done the past twenty-one years at the Georgetown Hospital? Burnham brought a surgeon named Innocent Muchenagumbo (see my February 27, 2008 column on this man) to run the Georgetown Hospital in 1982. The Georgetown Public Hospital offers the same service as when Muchenagumbo made a mess of things.
In 1985 my mom died there. They didn’t have porters to fetch her up the stairs when she was admitted. In 2011, my nephew got into an accident and they didn’t have porters to lift him.
The PPP will fix Guyana. Give them another fifty years. Only problem with that is that there may not be a country. Time will not wait on the PPP. It waits on no one.

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