Did you see what I saw in Buenos Aires and Donetsk?

Jul 18, 2014 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

In a column months ago, I wrote that in a video that portrayed the fighting in Donetsk, in the Ukraine, I saw separatists manning a check point and it was at a junction where traffic signals were working. Fighting was taking place in the area and the signals were happily doing what they were supposed to do.
Well this week, I saw another amazing traffic light display. After the loss of the World Cup, some Argentines rioted in downtown Buenos Aires. Right where the violence was taking place the traffic signals were working. In fact, on one of the poles someone hung a large Argentinean football jersey.
In these two cities, violence was taking place on streets where the traffic lights were in functional use. In Guyana, Georgetown is quieter than a tomb, yet traffic lights do not work and haven’t been working since they were installed in 2007. This is a topic I have dwelled on in these columns for years now and will come back to it from time to time.
I have no formal training in engineering, so my curiosity is logical – why in the 21st century does a country lack the capacity to maintain traffic signals?
From my layman’s knowledge it should be a very simple thing. I mean people are killing each other at a junction in the Ukraine right where the traffic lights are in use. In the heart of Buenos Aires, rioters are tearing buildings apart and burning vehicles right next to the traffic lights.
What is strange about this traffic light disappearance is that no one writes about it. There isn’t even a little comment somewhere in the letter sections of our newspapers. The reason is very simple – people have just given up on this country.
One thing I learned from being a columnist – do not underestimate the knowledge of politics of the average Guyanese.
Last Monday, I had lunch with Dr. David Hinds and Tacuma Ogunseye. People would pass our table all the time and make informed comments about the extent of political and social decay in Guyana. And their views were certainly not immature or childish. The average Jane and John in Guyana have more than just a passing knowledge of their country’s problems.
Do you think Guyana doesn’t know that from the seventies we have been mistreated at Caribbean airports? And they know that it will not stop. They know that this seems to be the fate of Guyana. What they would like to have is an analytical explanation as to why Guyana never had and does not seem to have a future.
The traffic light tragedy is not an engineering problem. It symbolizes all that is just fundamentally wrong with this philosophically flawed country.
It is clear for most Guyanese to see that a myth has exploded like a huge jetliner in our backyard. If the rule and era of President Burnham made Guyana disliked in the Caribbean and the world, and Guyana was reduced to poverty under a system that had no free and fair elections, then why are we still a country like when Mr. Burnham ruled? The myth has exploded – the problem was not Mr. Burnham but Guyana itself.
Why from 2002 more than 125,000 people permanently left these shores? Why after thirty years since Mr. Burnham’s death, Guyana cannot maintain simple traffic lights? Why since the seventies do we have to live in blackouts? That is nearing fifty years of erratic electricity supply. Our fifty-one-year-old university is barely alive. Surely, the lights, the university and the electricity breakdown cannot be technical predicaments. No! They are signs of a larger demon at work, the tale of a dystopian nation.
I grew up in Wortmanville hearing the bigger folks talking about how BWIA treated Guyanese. More than fifty years after those youthful days, look how the same airline humiliates the citizens of this country. It is as if that Trinidadian company hates the Guyanese people. Maybe that company sees Guyana the same way it did in the seventies when Guyana had no food and money and we behaved in Trinidad and in the planes in ways that were just terrible.
Why in 2014, has Guyana gone nowhere since our collapse in the seventies? I grew up seeing Guyana exporting sugar, rice, bauxite, gold and fruits. Exactly fifty years after, Guyana is doing exactly the same thing. Nothing has changed. The streets that had no bulbs when I roamed Georgetown as a little ten-year-old still don’t have lighted bulbs. It is as if civilization has disappeared from this land.
Guyana is truly an ancient tragedy.

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Did you see what I saw in Buenos Aires and Donetsk?

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