Why do we remain so backward?

Oct 28, 2016 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I was shopping downtown yesterday for a scratching post for my cat. Christmas music was playing in some of the stores. It jolted me into the conscious awareness that the year which has just “begun” is ending. It seems to me that 2016 just started. As I walked out of one of the stores, suddenly I started to think about how life is quickly moving and people of my age do not have many more years to do all the things we would have liked to do. Then an incident occurred right in front of me.
As I moved toward my car, I saw a traffic cop and a driver in an argument. The policeman had the driver’s documents in his hands and words were being exchanged. There and then the compelling thought resurfaced; that time is moving too quickly and I will not live long enough to see a post-modern Guyana. There and then I felt a touch of sadness, not for me but for Guyana. I didn’t stop to listen to the exchange but I thought about how backward my country is.
I will do a column (maybe tomorrow or the next day or next week) on the things I have regrets about. And certainly Guyana’s backwardness will be all over the article. I am simply pained that I did not enjoy a modern Guyana when I spent 26 years teaching at UG.
I recall an incident in Canada in 1980. A group of graduate students from the University of Toronto were stopped by a traffic cop. The driver was Jamaican. I was the only Guyanese in the car. What you are about to read will live in my mind until I die, once I remain in Guyana. It was a culture shock to me.
The cop took the documents from the driver and went to his squad car. On his return, he handed the driver his stuff and waved us on. Poor me; an unexposed Guyanese from a poor country hadn’t a clue about what went on. I asked. The cop radioed in the name, the driver’s licence number and the licence plate of the car, to ascertain if they corresponded with what he had in his hand.
There is a central office where there is a database that would give traffic cops who call in, the information they want on a driver’s licence. Now, just a tiny digression that you will find hard to believe. One of the persons in that car had a brother who actually worked at the time in that office, and he would relay back the details to the traffic cops who call in. It was an amazing coincidence for me.
This incident took place 36 years ago. I returned to Guyana in 1984 and lived here since. And since 1984, there is absolutely no way a traffic cop on the road could find out if a licence in front of him is bogus, and that he has stopped one of the most dangerous killers in Guyana. The killer talks nicely, begs for a chance, the cop lets him go and the killer lives to kill on another day.
It is this kind of backwardness I regret and deeply so; it is the angst it brings that has tempted me to do a column on the things I regret in my life now that I am over sixty years of age.
Why is this land so un-modern and we are in the year 2016 which is sixteen years beyond the 20th century? Nigel McKenzie, the deputy editor of this newspaper, told me that the street lights have gone out in large areas on the main highways on the East Bank and West Coast Demerara. This should come as no surprise to any citizen. I am in total confusion as a non-technical person as to why the lamps go out and remain like that for years.
Electrical engineering is no big science. In a technical school on the same level with a high school, students are taught the science electrical engineering in most countries. What is so complicated with an electrical system of a country that the lights of the main highways cannot remain alight for three or four or five consecutive years?
To see the primitive nature of Guyana, come to Turkeyen where I live. The GPL technicians come once each month and the technicians fix the lights on the UG Road from the Atlantic highway right to the entrance of Cyril Potter’s College. Two nights later, the lights go out. This happens all the time.

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