25 minutes of evil

Nov 15, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Last Monday, I went into Wortmanville to pick up my nephew to locate a carpenter. The time was about 8:20 am. He was coming out of the yard with his kid to take her to school. He suggested I wait for him. As he reached the road, the rains came and they both ran back to the house. I suggested that we take the kid to school then drive on to Carmichael Street for the carpenter.
I did not count the duration of the rain, but I am inflexible on the time. The downpour lasted for 25 minutes. For sure it was not beyond half an hour. As we drove back home from Carmichael Street, most of the roadways we passed were flooded. Citizens’ yards were flooded, included my nephew’s. You cannot read about it. Even if you watch it on video it would not be potent in your eyes. You had to be around in those 25 minutes to see the failure of Guyana.
I see people are now openly criticizing the so-called leaders in the private sector. For me, many of them were moral no-goods and I voiced that openly of them a long time ago in my political activism. On the campaign trail in 2011, I denounced many of them, actually naming a few of the depraved ones. Some of them do not love this country and its people. They love money, plenty of which they have in foreign bank accounts. Check the places of health they go to when sick – foreign hospitals. Check where they send their offspring to school – foreign universities. They have left our own UG.
Yes, our own UG is not our own anymore, because it has fallen down. Guyana has fallen down. This is why after 25 minutes of steady downpour, the homes of the poor and powerless in Georgetown are flooded. I saw 25 minutes of this evil on Monday last and I hate what my country has become.
These moral no-goods could jump on Mount Roraima and denounce the opposition for not passing the anti-money laundering Bill, but remain diabolically silent in a country where after 25 minutes of rain, Georgetown is flooded. Those 25 minutes were their creation.
What is so frightening in this country is that you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if 25 minutes of rain can bring such swollen streets what would four hours of a downpour do?
If you saw College Road between Brickdam and Hadfield Street in Wortmanville on Monday where the technical head office of GT&T is located then you know that GT&T cannot avoid total wreck of its lower buildings if we have eight hours of a thunderstorm.
We are talking about a national disaster if we have those four hours. We are talking about the devastation of Georgetown if those four hours go into eight hours. We are talking about the erasure of Georgetown if those eight hours repeat themselves the next day.
In celebrating 21 years of office for the PPP in Lusignan, Bharrat Jagdeo told his listeners that Guyana is a good country and they must not be disillusioned by a few clogged drains (see my response to Jagdeo’s horrific statement, “No one in Lusignan and Guyana can be that silly,” KN, Wed., Oct 19, 2013).
The most horrible aspect of that deception is the word “few.” I need not repeat my argument here because not only Georgetowners, but all Guyanese (yes, all) in this land and the Diaspora know that Georgetown as a city is immensely clogged with a drainage system that has been blocked up for all of the twenty-one years of PPP rule.
My question is how any business class in a country can accept this? How can the opposition too?
There is only one word to describe what I saw last Monday –evil. What I saw in Georgetown was evil in all its manifestations. One has to have a sickening mind to praise a Government where in the 21st century half an hour of rain floods the capital city.
A Cabinet Minister recently told me that I want to bring down the Government. I did not respond directly because of her choice of words. But I leave you with the words of the Great Mahatma Gandhi – “non-cooperation with evil is a sacred duty.”

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25 minutes of evil

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