An ordinary Muslim beats an English billionaire’s son

May 10, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Ain’t the world full of surprises? After France, after Trump, who would have thought that the financial capital of the world, London (some says it is New York), would have elected a Muslim Mayor. But that is not all. The Muslim contestant is an ordinary guy in financial terms and his rival is the second richest politician in the UK Parliament. He is the son of a now deceased billionaire.
Wealth didn’t work. And it didn’t, because voters in London are not stupid people like Guyanese voters. Londoners who voted for Sadiq Khan overlooked his Muslim character, his non-White skin, his ordinary financial standing. They voted for a politician that they knew and felt they could trust. This is modern thinking.
Khan is a Muslim but he is against the idiocy of Muslim extremism. He is against the terror Muslim lunatics are attempting to spread around the world. It would have been wrong to reject Khan simply because he is a Muslim. It is not what you are; it is what you stand for. Interesting to note that like Obama’s victory, White people were the decisive factor in the London contest. Without the White vote, Khan, like Obama, would not have succeeded. Khan won 59. 5 percent of the vote
Juxtapose the London election with our just concluded Local Government poll. You will see how backward Guyanese are. I was with the Stabroek Square vendors last week when they attempted to picket the Office of the President and were pushed back at the northern head of Shiv Chanderpaul Drive. Many of the demonstrators were so enraged that they kept telling me how they regretted voting for the APNU-AFC in the local elections. Given the atmosphere, I didn’t remonstrate with them but they had a choice and they threw it away.
Why would a Georgetowner want to put in power at City Hall the same party that is in power in the central government? Isn’t it commonsensical that you need a balance? You will not have a balance if the same leadership of the Guyana Government is the leadership at City Hall. This is what happened with the vendors.
Georgetowners had a choice between, on the one hand, Team Benschop, Team Legacy, Youth For Local Government and on the other hand, the ruling party in central government – APNU-AFC. Only two seats went to Team Legacy. Team Benschop got one.
What the vendors needed to ask themselves is, if the big wigs in the Guyana Government wanted the City Council to move against the vendors if Team Benschop, Team Legacy and Youth For Local Government would have agreed if they were in the majority at City Hall? The answer is no. The Town Clerk and the Mayor and her Deputy could not have done what they did if APNU-AFC didn’t have a majority in the Council. I could see someone like Mark Benschop getting into a confrontation with the Town Clerk.
Georgetowners and Indo-Guyanese showed no courage and no modern thinking when they voted in the LGE last April. They chose ethnicity over issues and now the Stabroek Square vendors are paying a terrible price for such a primitive mind.
I read in the newspaper where the wife of a murdered farmer deep in the Parika area lamented the darkness of the spot where he was attacked. She felt if there were street lights his attackers might have been deterred. She is right, but the results for the local voting in that area showed a massive victory for the PPP. The PPP was in power for 23 years and that area remains in darkness. Yet in 2016, these very villagers that endured such ancient conditions put the PPP candidates into power in the NDC in Parika.
Poor people are their own worst enemy yet they sit on top the funeral pyre of their self-destruction and want others to help them. I am hearing all the time that if there is another General Election, the PPP will win. Why should it win? What has it done for the majority of its constituencies for the past 23 years? Indians voted like that for over 50 years; in the process they sold themselves into a new form of slavery. The PPP is possessed of a psychology of ownership of Indian people. Why would the slave master listen to the slave; he/she is a slave.
The PNC is emblazoned with the same mental thinking – we own Black people. These very Georgetowners who are now seeing what monopolistic power can do will go back in 2019 in another LGE and in 2020 in another general poll and vote for their slave masters.

2 thoughts on “An ordinary Muslim beats an English billionaire’s son”

rs dasai May 10, 2016 at 9:20 am

Is it ‘religion’ versus ‘money’?
Surujpaul Rampersaud May 10, 2016 at 1:03 pm

Freddie, you are theoretically correct. However, what is the issue of changing the vote. The new government is just reaching out to the base. What you get is not change but exchange.