Dresden makes Guyana look like a prehistoric site

Mar 22, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Several times in these columns, I have made reference to Dresden in Germany. The rebuilding of the city of Dresden is the most compelling evidence in social science analysis that something must be genetically wrong with the PPP as a collective body of people.
Dresden is the worst example in the history of warfare of intense bombing. The city was reduced to rubble by aerial bombing in 1945. Twenty years after the Second World War, Dresden was rebuilt. In 2015, Dresden is one of the world’s most post-modern cities. Here is a city that was almost completely destroyed by war, yet was rebuilt in less than twenty years.
Compare Dresden to Guyana. The comparison makes for extremely depressing reading. In 1992, the PPP came to power. At that time I was a lecturer at the University of Guyana. At that time there were still a functioning library, a bookstore, a maintenance division, buildings in proper condition. In 1992, UG had a section named the Caribbean Reference Library (CRL).
Look at UG in 2015. The CRL is closed. The bookstore died ages ago. The maintenance division has less than ten staff. The buildings are falling down. In twenty years, Dresden was rebuilt. In twenty years UG was destroyed.
In 1992, the PPP inherited a wonderful Botanical Garden on Vlissengen Road. The zoo wasn’t top class but it was acceptable. I jogged in the Botanical Garden everyday during the late eighties. I took my baby daughter to the zoo every day after she was born in 1989. After twenty-three years of PPP rule the zoo is in horrible condition. The Botanical Garden is a virtual mess.
Today when you look at Guyana, you see the failure of political power and in contrast, the resilience of private money. The juxtaposition tells a story of power that has destroyed this sad, pessimistic nation.
I went into Starr Computer on Brickdam and I see a store that is comparable with any you find in the developed world. I go to Bakewell pastry shop and it resembles any of its kind in Europe. I was a patient at Balwant Singh Hospital and the physical environment was comparable to any hospital I have seen in Canada.
There are top class shopping malls that have gone up all over Guyana that are quite impressive as the types you see in rich Trinidad. The supermarkets in Georgetown can hold their own against those we see in the Caribbean. The physical interior of the commercial banks are top class. None of these developments had governmental input. They came about through the ideas of private entrepreneurs.
Juxtapose this with the public building and public service. I was in the High Court weeks ago for the Jagdeo libel case and I showed the Kaieteur News reporter the condition of the courtroom we were in. The High Court looks like a dilapidated building with falling windows, hanging gutters, leaking roofs and overflowing sewage, that is older than half of the population of Guyana. Go and stand up outside the Ministry of Social Services next to the abandoned Coop Bank and you will see the dirtiest surroundings in the entire world.
Drive or ride around this city just for five minutes and you will see traffic signals that don’t work and streets without lights. Go to any public school and you will see the most abominable washrooms your eyes will not see in any school anywhere in the world. Most of the Ministries in this country look like rundown buildings when you enter them.
As a Guyanese you have to ask yourself what the PPP Government has done with twenty-three years of control. There are several theories about the PPP administration that if posited in polemical exchanges, scholars would find too harsh to accept. But they should be discussed, because they have explanatory power.
One of these theories of mine is that I think the given the nature of the people that inherited power after the PNC lost the election in 1992, they were anti-state, they didn’t see the state in nationalist terms and set about trying to minimize and weaken it. The person who rejects this argument would ask why then if these people hate the state they would want to stay in power and exert control of a place they don’t like?
Space will not allow for an extension of my theory, but the reply is that they see the state as a way of patronizing their friends, relatives and families, but essentially they hate it and will not inject ideas and money to save it. This I think explains the twenty-three years of public decline.

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Dresden makes Guyana look like a prehistoric site

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