The governance of this country is a mystery

Feb 20, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

On Tuesday afternoon, Kaieteur News sports journalist Rawle Welch asked for a ride to the passport office. When we walked inside the building, I saw an unbelievable sight. Literally hundreds of people were waiting. They were waiting to be served for different reasons (a line to pay, a line to deposit documents, a line to be photographed).
I saw that very scene fifteen years ago, and fifteen years ago wrote about it in my column in this very newspaper. It remains a mystery why after fifteen years, passport applicants go through the same torturous labyrinth. How do you explain such an unchanging situation? Could be that there is no explanation; it is a mystery.
I joined the line inside the GRA to have my vehicular road licence. Before I proceed, let me say that I find the continuation of the required road licence a most sickening anachronism. A driver needs to have a certificate that the car is roadworthy. A driver needs to have insurance. A driver needs to have car registration. A driver needs to have a certified licence to drive.
These are all required documents that have a commonsensical foundation. The police need to know if you are a certified driver; the police need to see if your car is fit to be on the road; what purpose does the vehicular road licence serve? There is none. It came with colonial times when you had to have radio licence, bicycle licence etc. Why does this country retain this ancient stupidity?
I remember as a small boy when my father saw the radio licence man coming, he would hide one of the two radios in the bedroom. Most people did that so they only paid for one document. That era is dead and gone. But part of it remains with the requirement of something named the vehicular road licence. There is no question about it; this country is an ancient puzzle.
Back to the main issue. I stood in a long line and got my road licence. When I was leaving, I asked the internal uniformed security what those hundreds of persons were doing sitting under a large tent on the eastern lawn of the GRA. He said that they were waiting to be served for renewal of driver’s licences. I almost fainted, not at what I saw, but the prospects of me having to go through that thorny pathway in a few months’ time.
The mystery is ubiquitous, because as with the passport office, I saw that identical scene fifteen years ago. Why are we not progressing? Why are the same social insanities still existing fifteen years after they were born? Is there an explanation?
I live on the Railway Embankment next to that large cemetery that recently pronounced on the prorogation of Parliament as being legal – the CARICOM Secretariat. I would look out of my window and see this fancy, expensive GPL vehicle lift workmen into the skies so they can reach the lamps on the posts. They replace the bulbs that are dead.
We would have lights on the Railway Embankment where I live for two months, then the bulbs die and the fancy vehicle comes again and the cycle goes on. Every two months the lamps die and GPL replaces them. The obvious question is ‘Why?’ What is the problem?
Is it the actual mechanism that contains the bulbs or is it that the bulbs that GPL buy are so cheap that they last only two months? Since 2007 I have been living here and I see this masquerade six times each year. Surely that is a mystery.
I attended the funeral of my wife’s cousin at the CIOG on Woolford Avenue last Wednesday. A gentleman came and sat next to me and told me he is a Wortmanville boy, the Georgetown ward I was born into. For the rest of the funeral service we chatted (kind of disrespectful; I know).
As usual, the conversation turned to UG. I mentioned to him a story about UG and I saw the consternation on his face. I told him that I entered UG in 1974 and the square feet that the exam division occupied are the same since then right up to 2015. That space is exactly the same, forty years after I first entered UG. The security outpost at the entrance of UG is the very same space, no bigger, no smaller than when I first enrolled at UG.
The Promenade Gardens must have the world’s longest serving urinal. That urinal, at the Waterloo Street entrance, made by Armitage Company, has been there since the Gardens first opened at the beginning of the 20th century.

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