Guyanese East Indians have to speak to PPP supporters

Jun 17, 2015 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One night during the election campaign, I was on the platform at Strathavon in Cane Grove. A group of five young boys and girls stood opposite to where the meeting was held, in a bus shed waving large PPP flags. The speakers directly faced them.
The bus shed had a large barrel with a handle to give the appearance of a cup, the symbol of the PPP. With cash for the campaign that no computer could have counted, the PPP could have employed a competent PR specialist. The cup in the form of a barrel was a moronic thing that all Guyanese laughed at including PPP supporters.
Who came up with the idea of using a barrel in the form of cup? It didn’t work. With Rohee, Ramotar, Ramson Senior, Kwame Mc Coy, Neil Kumar, Priya “Satyra” Manickchand providing nuff jokes that made the nation laugh at the PPP, the party certainly didn’t need to do something as stupid as the barrel/cup symbol to attract more derision. But that is what happened.
Why couldn’t the PPP have funded a few thousand large cups from a foundry? It had the money to pay for it. The barrel thing was uglier than Jagdeo’s Berbice Bridge. So there you are traveling up to Region Five to speak at a meeting, and staring you throughout the villages are these large barrels precariously perched on the lantern posts.
One afternoon on my way to speak at Rosignol, we saw a large crowd in one of the villages and thought it was a road fatality. We took a look and found out that one of the barrels got loose and fell on a villager’s donkey and broke its back. It was pathetic to see the donkey lying there in pain.
The owner was livid and began cussing down the PPP. Some young men were angry at him for doing so because they saw us in the crowd. One of the youths had a cup in his hand and he struck the owner of the donkey with it. They put the donkey into the fallen barrel and rolled it away. Anyway back to Strathavon.
When it was my turn to speak, I directly addressed the five young people at the bus shed. I told them that there were businessmen who were given contracts by the PPP Government that made their businesses into multi-billion enterprises and I didn’t see the children who benefited from such PPP patronage at the bus shed with flags in their hands. I informed them that such children wouldn’t even drive on the muddy roads of Strathavon. The flag-wavers were ashamed and left.
I took the same attitude at a public meeting in Mon Repos. A taxi driver passed the meeting, slowed down and began to cuss me down. I told the crowd how ironic it was that it was a taxi driver doing the dirty work for the PPP, but I didn’t see the rich men who benefited from the PPP Government driving around at APNU-AFC meetings cussing down the speakers. The small crowd of Indian attendees was incensed and began to hurl insulting remarks at the taxi-driver.
My point is that if you discourse with PPP supporters and prove to them how contemptuous the PPP Government has been of the ordinary man and woman, they will listen. Take the PPP picketers outside GECOM. Among the protestors was a man who was the subject of a corruption enquiry at NCN. Why was he still around the PPP? The answer is the protection these people were given by the PPP Government. Do the protestors want this type of regime back in power?
Take Shaun Samaroo. He was paid sixteen million dollars for a project he said related to the Rodney Commission. I spent twenty-six years at UG and don’t have sixteen million dollars. The PPP junta had journalists slaving for them at NCN, Chronicle, GINA, channels 65 and 69 and the Guyana Times, many of whom could have undertaken the same job Samaroo was awarded.
I don’t know if Samaroo is a university-trained journalist, but what was special about him that caused the PPP to overlook so many of its loyal journalists and award a sixteen million contract to Samaroo? Samaroo’s reporting on the contents of the Rodney Commission was ineffective in the Chronicle because it turned off readers with its propagandistic style. It didn’t influence readers.
Really, why would young Indians protest in the cruel midday sun for a party that has been so insulting to its own supporters? It is a foregone conclusion that those picketers will dry up soon. The PPP itself will dry up soon.

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Guyanese East Indians have to speak to PPP supporters

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