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Me, Sam Hinds and fleeting power

May 28, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Yesterday morning, I left my doggie in the car right in front of Bakewell and rushed in to get Danish for her. When I came outside, former Prime Minister, Sam Hinds was entering Bakewell. There was one person with him. I may be wrong but the person appeared to me to be his driver. I have been around long enough to know the “cut” of security men.
As I was leaving and Sam was entering, we came in close physical proximity to each other. Two men accosted Sam and said, “Mr. Prime Minister, we need some construction wuk.” I can’t remember his exact response, but the next thing I heard was one of the men saying, ‘well if yuh kyaant find wuk, buy we a little something nuh?” I said; “c’mon, Sam, buy the men something.” Sam turned to the men, pointed to me and said’, “you don’t know this famous man, he got money, he could buy something for you.”
Two things pierced my mind with that encounter outside the doorsteps of Bakewell. First, for the time he was Prime Minister, (just short of twenty-three years), whenever I saw Sam, his entourage of security detail, other officials and driver never totaled less than seven. That sight always irked me. Each time I saw that school of attendants with the former Prime Minister, I would say to myself; “I need that protection, not Sam; who wants to hurt Sam Hinds?”
I was outside Kaieteur News, and there was Sam with his school of seven walking along Saffon Street on the pavement outside of Kaieteur News. I was driving on Main Street and at the corner where Main Street meets Cowan Street, there was Sam with his designer running clothes and his school of seven. My wife was waiting one evening at Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital to see Dr. Fawcett Jeffrey. Sam came in and was given priority treatment which was understandable and justified because, after all, that was the Prime Minister.
I waited outside in the hospital compound because my wife was in a long line. Sam was finished, and said a few words to me as he neared his car, indicating to me that I could write that the Prime Minister visited a private hospital. And there was his school of seven waiting for him.
I was picketing Sam’s office at Wight’s Lane when he was Prime Minister. The issue was the Marriott Hotel. It was raining heavily that day, so the picketers sought shelter under the car shed. Sam came down and engaged us. He put his hand on my shoulder and when he did that, the Stabroek News photographer snapped us. The next day the photo was in the Stabroek.
What the newspaper did report was my anger at the Prime Minister for having one official in his school of seven holding an umbrella like a slave. We were under the shed, no rain was on Sam, yet the man was holding the umbrella over Sam’s head and Sam never saw it fit to tell him to lower it. I was livid and demanded that he tell the attendant to close the umbrella. He did so. This was the picture of Sam Hinds I saw in those twenty-three years that he was Prime Minister.
When I saw him alone with his driver, thoughts of fleeting power just flew all over my mind. But it was the adjective, “famous” that sent an emotional charge through me. He told the two men I was famous. If I am famous then I am a survivor. Wasn’t it the government in which Sam was the second in charge that terminated my UG contract? Am I still famous? I am no longer a university teacher. Am I still famous after two attacks on my life?
Even if I had kept my doggie waiting in the car to stop and chat with Sam, I would not have brought up my survival or asked him why I was famous, according to him. It would have been pointless. I know Sam Hinds, and he would have said he knows nothing about what happened to me back then at UG or the two nasty attacks.
For all the nice man that people say Sam Hinds is, Sam Hinds would never issue an apology to people who his government mauled, violated and ill-treated. This is what makes me doubt the ultimate affability of people like Sam Hinds. They say he was the nice face among the bad guys in the bad PPP kingdom. But in that kingdom, he was second in charge. He bears responsibility for what the kingdom did.

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