Pleasant surprise at the GRA yesterday

Mar 16, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

They say in life, one must be decent and fair and give Jack his jacket when he deserves it. Yesterday, I went into the GRA to renew my vehicular road licence. There was this wicket that read “vehicular road licence,” and there was no line. I walked up to the attendant and within a minute I was gone.
Given the sadism that inheres in the Overdeveloped State in post-colonial societies, this was a phenomenal occurrence.
This is a mighty plus for the government. It is simply an incredible transformation in state delivery. If the Coalition can continue with such service, it will win people’s support. Contrary to the popular notion that people concentrate on politics and judge governments by its political attitudes, untold numbers of citizens just want to live their lives in peace with access to modern state services. These folks have no interest in which Minister was drunk, which Minister employed his cousin at which public corporation, or which Minister has a mistress.
Overall, in the world we live in, people want to live peacefully in their country and they will not devote energy and passion to participate in a picket or demonstration once the country is peaceful and they have modern comfort. It goes wrong, terribly wrong, when people have to wait in long lines to pay a bill, get a driver’s license, secure a passport, procure a birth certificate, receive an answer for an NIS enquiry etc.
You are not going to believe the next line of this column. My daughter is a witness. I tried calling the Bank of Nova Scotia and got through forty-one minutes later. And I know it was forty-one minutes because my daughter counted the time. These are the unpleasant things people do not want in their lives.
What happens, then, is that governments receive the hatred of its citizens because of the pain involved in those waits. Unreasonable bosses are not going to tolerate an employee absent out of the work place for four hours. But that is the time it takes to submit a birth certificate application, passport application, see an NIS attendant, make a GPL query. What happens when a woman has a baby and GPL comes to disconnect her and she insists she has paid? She has to wait three hours at a GPL branch to make a complaint.
The PPP invoked the hatred of Guyanese because of extremely terrible state services. This is coming from a citizen who has endured these nightmares under the PPP. I know about non-existent state services. I know what it is like to be in a line for three hours. I have not used the Freddie Kissoon name to jump the queue because the people in the line would bring down the house.
The PPP Government had a sadistic disdain for these kinds of suffering Guyanese had to put up with because always was the thought, “We can’t lose elections.” Based on that mythology, they treated this entire nation with utter contempt.
This was one of the areas that the PPP created self-destruction. Every major state service was an experience in pain, stress and grief. I remember when my mother-in-law died. To apply for the death certificate, you had to submit the original hospital’s statement of cause of death. When I went to the NIS to apply for death benefits, NIS told me they have to get the original state of cause of death from the hospital. So two state agencies, literally created an impossibility for a citizen. I went to the hospital and was told they can only give a photocopy. This is the kind of sadism that citizens lived with under the PPP government which lasted almost 23 years.
I really don’t know what happened at the GRA yesterday to cause the line to be empty. I hope it is a beautiful, encouraging, spiritual sign of things to come but I honestly cannot tell my readers I am optimistic because I am not. I acknowledge here that I did not have to wait at the GRA yesterday but I should be cautious because I know my country. I study my country.
I live in my country. I also accept the theory of the Overdeveloped State which argues that state services are not a priority in post-colonial countries and that security is the overwhelming passion of the leaders.
I did see a huge queue under a tent on the lawns of the GRA. People were waiting to hand in their application for driver’s license renewal. That what I saw is wrong. Citizens should not be treated like that.

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