Priya Manickchand and the dead man from Timbuktu

Jun 02, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I don’t have a Facebook account. Don’t know what happens in that sphere, but from time to time friends show me interesting posts. Yesterday, I was shown one such posting which I was told belonged to Priya Manickchand. It was a photograph of the long and winding queue outside the Passport Office. But that was only the beginning of the Manickchand post. A man from Timbuktu saw the photo from Manickchand and made a telephone call to Guyana to enquire about Manickchand.
He was told that she is a member of the parliamentary opposition. He thought this was a very radical politician in the Caribbean and he wanted to meet her. So enthralled was the Timbuktu guy that he took a straight flight from Mali and entered Guyana to meet the lady who made the news worldwide from the American Ambassador incident.
He touched down at Eugene Correia Airport and on his way to meet the lady, made a stop at Congress Place. He was misled by the taxi driver who informed him that Congress Place is a political party office. He didn’t tell the visitor that it was the Head Office of the ruling party.
The Manickchand fan believed that he was at the Head Office of Manickchand’s party. Then the man got a rude awakening. PNC officials showed him a history of Manickchand as a part of the power structure of a party that held office for a few months shy of twenty-three years. He was shown the long lines outside the Passport Office when Manickchand was Minister of Social Services and old people from Essequibo and Berbice had to come way to Georgetown and apply for the document at that very office that appeared in Manickchand’s cynical Facebook posting.
But the photo that really devastated the visitor was when he was shown the endless lines outside the Ministry of Education of parents waiting for transfers and placements that they never got.
By now the gentleman was told that Manickchand could be reached at Freedom House. He told the driver to take him to Freedom House. But before he left, the folks at Congress Place gave him photocopies of the long lines all over Guyana when Manickchand was Minister of Social Services and later, Minister of Education.
The image that upset the gentleman was the long passages of old people waiting outside all the post offices in Guyana for their little pittance. The man from Timbuktu sat in the front seat of the car and kept looking at the photo of the old age pensioners.
He asked the driver if the photos were genuine. The driver pointed out to him that they were photocopies from actual Guyana newspapers. He turned to the driver and said; “Is this, the person I travelled so far to embrace?” He intoned that he was disappointed that she presided over the very depravities that she is now condemning.
The taxi-guy reported that as the man kept talking about his chagrined feelings about Manickchand, his face turned a white shade of pale. Then he stopped talking. As the car pulled up outside of Freedom House, the man sat motionless, with head slumped to his right side. He was dead. Post-Mortem revealed he died from a grieving heart
Anyone listening to Clement Rohee, Gail Teixeira, and Donald Ramotar would not believe that the first two have been Cabinet Ministers from 1992 to 2015; that Donald Ramotar was leader of the party in power from 1993 to 2011 and President for three years; that Bharrat Jagdeo was President for one dozen years.
Let’s return to Manickchand. I saw students cry at UG after being in lines similar to the Passport Office queue she posted on her Faceboook page and that happened when she was Minister of Education. They were waiting to be registered.
I saw how parents cried in the line after waiting a whole day to get a transfer to another school closer to where they live or work. And this was under Manickchand as Minister, and her mother as Senior Education Officer for Secondary Schools. I approached Manickchand’s mother for a transfer for a distraught mother but was turned down. This was the type of run-down system named Guyana that Manickchand presided over as Minister of Education.
When I wrote about the irregularities of placements under Minister Manickchand, she called my editor and publisher and behaved the way she did at the American Ambassador’s residence. She probably thought she was magical and mesmerizing enough to get the newspaper to do what her government did to me at UG when she was the very Minister of Education.

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Priya Manickchand and the dead man from Timbuktu

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