Fifty-one years of Independence and DNA testing

May 26, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Just days before we reached this landmark on this day of achieving 51 years of Independence, the Government announced that DNA testing will be done in 2018 in Guyana. The reason is that many samples sent to Trinidad and Barbados took too long or some got misplaced.

Barbados is an island with an area of 166 square miles, whose historical and current economy was and is intricately tied up with tourism. If you make a comparative examination of Guyana and Barbados, then the conclusion is that Guyana has to be a failed state if it cannot do DNA testing but Barbados can.

The mind gets mired in deeper confusion each day in this country as you witness opposition politics playing out. Can we blame the current administration for the absence of DNA testing in Guyana? No decent mind would say yes. The depraved mind would say yes. And that warped mental structure is what is destroying Guyana.

One former President, Bharrat Jagdeo, holds a weekly press conference. Another president, Donald Ramotar, writes a weekly missive in the newspapers. This will go on non-stop once these men remain in politics (not certain if Donald Ramotar is still in official politics), but in the mountainous heaps of pronouncements, these two men and their fellow party leaders in the PPP will never touch on why Barbados does DNA testing and not Guyana.

They will never touch that subject and thousands of similar ones. If and when they do, then they justify the criticisms of their detractors, that the PPP leadership is unfit to remain not only in politics but be the main opposition party. I have kept insisting in these columns over the decades that the recovery of Dresden in Germany after WW2 shows what a failure Guyana is. If Dresden could recover from the second worst aerial bombing in the history of warfare (the worst being the American bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War) and today is a post-modern city, then Guyana is an absolute failure as a viable nation.

Dresden was reduced to virtual destruction from Allied bombing during the final moments of WW2. No Guyanese can remain mentally stable if they leave Guyana and descend into Dresden and stare at that modern place. I have kept asking in these columns over the long years that I have been doing them; what have we done with decades and decades of Independence?

Those that must be held accountable are in the present leadership of the PPP. I keep repeating in these columns that 23 years is a huge amount of time for one particular party to be in power. What has the PPP leadership done with 23 years of power?

Space will not permit an enumeration, but for me, the Marriott Hotel constitutes one of the worst crimes committed against this nation. With sugar and rice failing, with the country’s only university falling down, with the central hospital needing life-saving machines, with schools in a dilapidated state, with a capital city that was the dirtiest in the world, President Jagdeo took 60 million American dollars and built a Marriott Hotel. It was post-colonial madness that has few parallels since colonial empires dissolved in the sixties.

The former APNU supporter, city accountant, Nigel Hinds, has blamed me for an outpouring of denunciations against Bharrat Jagdeo in these columns (see his letter in this newspaper yesterday). I am not going to dignify Hinds’s crass opportunism with a response. I think most people in this land, including PPP supporters, are aware of the tragic nature of Jagdeo’s reign. It has set us back by decades. Why did Jagdeo spend money from the treasury of one of the globe’s poorest countries to build a Marriott Hotel and Barbados, a tourist economy, does DNA testing and Guyana with huge natural resources and a massive landscape cannot?

I will ignore Hinds and appeal to the conscience of Guyanese to see where we have fallen down on the roads we have travelled since May 26, 1966.

We have gone astray because we have put into power leaders who proved they were absolutely no good. I feel deeply sympathetic in my heart for the welfare of sugar workers who will have to seek employment with the miniaturization of the sugar industry. But our people must see that the reason why little Barbados (I don’t mean any insult; just using the word for emphasis) can do DNA testing and Guyana cannot, is because for the past 23 years when they were in power, the PPP leaders destroyed our country.

Really man! Twenty-three years is a long, long time to be in power.

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