Can President Granger give Guyana this 50th Anniversary gift?

May 23, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

My wife has a special problem with life in Guyana. It is a special problem and it is too formidable to be solved. She insists that when she’s driving with me, I must take streets that have traffic signals. Like most of the people around the world that are familiar with Guyana, she knows we top the list of countries that have the most uncivilized drivers. According to her, you cannot go wrong because drivers have to stop at red.
But she gets very nervous when the signals aren’t working and at no time on any day, even ten percent of the signals throughout Guyana works. Last Saturday, she was agitated in the car because at the frightening junction of Railway Embankment and Sheriff Street, the traffic bulbs as usual were out of order. She was really scared because traffic was coming at us from all directions. The traffic light as a public service, has been around in the world for ages. It is not a complex technology but in Guyana even the most elementary forms of science are inscrutable to Guyanese.
The traffic lights have never worked smoothly since they were set up by Indian engineers in 2008. Since then they have constantly broken down. As we near the celebration of 50 years, I am suggesting to President Granger that as a birthday gift to this nation, he spends some state funds and employ a competent engineer from neighbouring Brazil or Surinam or Trinidad and let him/her fix the traffic lights system. If I go through my articles I must have touched on this public disgrace as much as ten times.
Are President Granger, his Prime Minster and his Cabinet not a little bit ashamed that humongous numbers will be pouring in for the Jubilee event and traffic signals do not function? What is eerie is that this is no complex technology? The problem I have with the Coalition leadership is that it is openly justifying the coercive mistreatment of vendors to clean Guyana so the Golden Jubilee could be celebrated in style and the humongous numbers could see a clean city but not bothered that the visitors will come out of a restaurant and run straight into an accident because an idiotic driver may not slow up at a junction where the signals have died.
What the Coalition Government is doing then is using the vendors in a merciless way. The essential question to ask is why would a visitor be enthralled to see a clean Stabroek Square but not laugh at Guyana when they see non-existent street lights and dead traffic signals? No matter how much they are mentally comforted at the sight of a spruced up Stabroek Square, they will laugh and become cynical when they have to drive through dark Georgetown.
This approach to presenting a pristine Georgetown for the Golden Jubilee is a deceptive game. I declined to serve on the National Commemoration Commission for a number of reasons and it is worthwhile to repeat some of them because I have been proven right. I will not discuss the main philosophical determinant which is that Guyana has failed the past 50 years so there is no intellectual emotion to galvanize me to be part of a the committee which will plan the celebration.
Other explanations involve the anticipation of hypocrisy which we are now seeing. You think I could have sat on the committee and hear the other members talking about cleaning up Stabroek Market Square while no attempt has been made by the Central Government to fix street lights and the long non-functioning bulbs on the East Coast Highway beginning from Clive Lloyd Drive!
Let me speak in unambiguous tones; I believe the Stabroek Market eviction did not originate from within the Chambers of City Hall but from deep inside the Central Government. I believe the Square should be decorated and made into a clean environment but why should I be concerned with that only as part of Government’s effort of resuscitating Georgetown as part of the Golden Jubilee? What about my wife’s concern as a Guyanese citizen? She hasn’t been to the Stabroek Square in ages thus that area may not be a priority for her. But she lives on the Railway Embankment where she expects the traffic lights to work so she would not have to cross the junction in fear. This is the hypocrisy that is going on with this Golden Jubilee celebration. In the year 2016, the year of the Golden Jubilee, we get blackouts at Turkeyen more often than when the PPP was in power. Saturday it was 5 hours.

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Can President Granger give Guyana this 50th Anniversary gift?

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