I am asking Berbicians to answer this question?

May 18, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When I saw photographs of the large crowds that gathered in Berbice to protest the downsizing of the sugar industry, one thought instantly flew into my mind. If the PPP when in government had itself moved away from sugar if there would have had that kind of massive reaction? I doubt it.
There was not even one hour of protest when the expensive bridge toll was announced. Berbicians lived with it. There was not one day of protest in Berbice when the evidence became manifest that the Skeldon investment was a terrible tragedy. There was not one day of protest in Berbice against the wrong things President Jagdeo did to this country. Mr. Jagdeo took NIS money and wildly invested it. Berbicians lost out because large numbers of Berbicians receive NIS pension. Mr. Jagdeo took NIS money and built the Berbice Bridge yet the toll was decided upon by the minority shareholders?
What do Berbicians want? They must tell the Guyanese people. Do they want a PPP government or do they want progress. They cannot have their cake and eat it too. There is an inherent contradiction between PPP rule and progress in Guyana. The two have produced a dialectic that has not worked for Berbicians. If they think it has, then they are either ideologically fixated or nihilistic people.
What do you say to Berbicians who turned out in their thousands to protest sugar downsizing, and were addressed by the sugar union that has supported a PPP Government for twenty-three years? President Jagdeo spent over sixty million American dollars to build a hotel. Why a hotel and not a better bridge for Berbice? Why a hotel and not put that money into development in Berbice? Why a hotel and not put that money to develop Black Bush Polder that has no street lights? In all these years Jagdeo was in power, Berbicians had to travel to Georgetown to submit passport and birth certificate applications.
I was jogging in the National Park when a lorry drove in and two persons got out and stopped me. One of the men said he came down from Berbice with his family only to be told at the passport office that your birth certificate must not be older than six months when applying for a passport. I looked at that man’s eyes and I saw the sadness. I immediately rang my editor, Adam Harris, and the next day, we carried his plight in the Kaieteur News.
The PPP Government stuck with that asinine policy and it was only overturned when Saphier Husain, a lawyer who had a similar birth certificate issue at the passport office, filed a court action and got a decision in his favour. This is the type of political party that Berbicians voted for in 2011 and again in 2015.
Misguided working class people voted for Donald Trump and he will not deliver. Already his policies favour big businesses. Berbicians have been misguided about the nature of the PPP. They have had a long time to reflect on the policies of the party they love. That party ruled Guyana for twenty-three years, and in that time, Berbicians must tell the rest of the country what developments took place there. Instead of twenty-three years of agricultural acceleration in Berbice, the PPP Government built a Marriott Hotel in Georgetown.
Do you know this newspaper earlier this year, sent one of its senior journalists, Leonard Gildarie, to do a feature on the number of closed homes in Berbice? Anyone who visited Berbice from 1998 onwards, especially from 2000, could easily have seen the profusion of abandoned homes. I went to teach in 2000 at the Berbice campus of UG and the phenomenon startled me. After twenty-three years in power, Berbice should have long turned their backs on this party that after Cheddi Jagan died, moved away from everything Jagan stood for.
I ask Berbicians to answer one question honestly. If the present government says that they will keep every aspect of the sugar industry and it will be business as usual; sugar will be subsidized, how will they vote if a general election was called tomorrow?
Berbicians have to level with the rest of the population. If the psychic choice of Berbice is to accept the permanent right of the PPP to govern Guyana, they must be candid with their fellow Guyanese and say so. Why must our tax dollars go into saving the sugar industry in order to assist Berbicians who don’t want to save themselves? They will vote back the PPP into power. Funny! Very funny!

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