Looking down at Guyana from way above the skies

Feb 07, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When angry Guyanese engage me about the PPP’s horrific performance, I would say to them that no one can understand what the PPP has done with more than two decades of power. On this page, I have made reference several times to the impossible recovery of Dresden in Germany. The story of Dresden is a sensitive one, because genetic dimensions of racism may come into the argument.
Some historians argue that the Allied bombing of Dresden in the final days of World War 2 is the worst type of aerial devastation in history. Dresden was flattened and was reduced to literally burnt earth. This was in 1945. By 1965, Dresden had become a normal, European city. Today, Dresden is an ultra-modern, futuristic city.
Forget about a comparison with other Third World countries, let’s take Guyana. It became a sovereign, independent state in 1966. Compare Dresden with sovereign Guyana today in 2014, and you may want to invoke the Naipaulian concept of racial explanation for the demise of Third World development.
Go up in the skies and look down upon this wretched land named Guyana and you see an unbelievable motion that the Marxist philosopher would say is not possible, because dialectics do not work like that. The dialectics never worked in Guyana. This explains why the country is receding into primitive times rather than going into the future where Dresden has long gone, to the point where Dresden is beyond imagination.
Of course Dresden is just one of hundreds of post-modern cities and they can be found not only in Europe Canada, Australia, China, Japan, and the US. In Turkey, Malaysia, Qatar, the UAE, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, just to name a few, there are fantastic cities where the developmental achievements are awesome. When young Guyanese see the height that civilization has reached in these places, wild horses cannot drag them back to Guyana.
When you look at this country is it dirty, run-down, poor, devastated, ruined, wretched. There is no movement towards a more developed society. On the contrary, we are going back in time. Go from above and look at the roads, parapets, trenches, gutters, alleyways, beaches, public parks, ports, bridges, public educational institutions, public buildings etc, and you see the stultification of a country.
Look at the road outside the Ministry of Human Services. Words cannot describe the sickening ambience. Look at the ugly, pauperized internal and external environment of the University of Guyana. And to think there has been a government in office since Independence in 1966. I say without fear of contradiction, there isn’t even a semi-clean toilet in any, I repeat, any public building. Toilet conditions are horrible at UG, Cyril Potter College, many schools, the courts, police stations, just to name a few.
Do you know the security lodge at the entrance of the UG campus is exactly the same building as when I first entered UG in 1974? Look at the filth that surrounds the base of the Independence Arch at Brickdam and Vlissengen Road. This is a prized possession of our country. It was a gift from the bauxite company at the time. In all, I repeat, all countries in the world that would have been preserved as a national gem. In Guyana, it is a national disgrace.
Stand on Avenue of the Republic as it meets Croal Street and look up at the façade of the High Court. The windows are falling down. The drainage pipes on the roof are hanging. In the courtyard itself, of this high judicial institution, sewage is seeping from the very spot that I saw it when I was a visitor to the Arnold Rampersaud trial in 1974.The sewage system of the High Court collapsed at the beginning of the eighties. It is still in that state and we are in the 21st century. In fact 14 years into the 21st century.
There are things you could not understand when you were very young. When Samuel Doe pulled off a coup in Liberia in 1980, I was hurt as a human being to see the way he dealt with the government personnel he had overthrown. You felt personally revolted deep inside at the way humans can threat others the way Doe did. As a philosophy student at the University of Toronto at the time, I hated Doe for what he had become.
But can we really understand the anger that boiled up inside of people like Doe, who for decades saw how ruling politicians treated Liberia. That was in 1980. Ask me how I feel now about what Doe did. It scares me to think that I may agree with his methods.

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Looking down at Guyana from way above the skies

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