Abnormal life as usual in Guyana

Jul 19, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Every morning I take my dog to walk on the Turkeyen seawall parallel to the UG Access Road. I take an unusual route to get there. Instead of using UG Road and parking by the Beharry Residence at the junction and cross over the highway to get to the seawall, I travel west on the Railway Embankment. I turn north into Conversation Tree then turn east onto the highway.
The reason for this longer route is because if I take the UG Road and park by Beharry’s, I would have to walk across that dangerous highway with my dog. I am not prepared to take that chance. On Monday morning, the traffic cop was there as usual at Conversation Tree Road, regulating traffic. When it was our turn to cross over, the rank as usual had his hand out stopping west bound traffic on the highway. A mini-bus driver ignored the hand signal and drove through. I was about to cross over so I was in his line of rampage.
The policeman looked on in consternation. I was in shock. There and then, I thought the cop would take out his pen and book and jot down the license plate. He did not and he did not use his communication device. As I crossed over, I looked carefully at his body; he wasn’t wearing a communication set. I am no police expert but in the modern world aren’t cops who do traffic and street patrols fitted out with communication sets? I would think that is commonsense.
Suppose that bus that ignored the policeman on Monday was carrying the escapees and that is why it went through, wouldn’t the communication have resulted in its interception? Suppose a robbery takes place and the vehicle has to ignore the hand signal of a rank regulating the traffic, is it not standard procedure for the rank to communicate what he saw to central command that would then do the necessary alert? The more you live in this country the larger the nihilistic picture gets.
Hours after that incident, I left home to reach the house of Gerhard Ramsaroop to join the funeral procession for the cremation of his wife at Ruimzeigt, West Coast Demerara. I reached Gerhard’s Alexander Village home at 11.55 am. I reached the cremation site at 1.18 pm not because the car broke down, not because the police cordoned off the area looking for the escapees, not because the aftermath of an earthquake destroyed Mandela Avenue that leads into the East Bank highway but because of bad traffic regulation.
On Mandela Avenue, I saw about twenty humongous container trucks that helped to slow down the traffic. Here is where class politics and destructive governance come in. Every day in this country, I wonder how sane, living human beings could accept the current leadership of the PPP. It was under the presidency of Bharrat Jagdeo that sand-trucks coming into Georgetown were banned after 7 am. The reason was traffic chaos they can cause when caught in both morning rush on the East Bank and in the city especially on Lombard Street.
But container- trucks create the same nightmares. I saw that on Monday on my way to the cremation.
So why the time restriction on sand-trucks and not container-trucks? Generally, sand-truck owners operate as individuals. I know about four such owners. They generally fall into the category of working class people. Container-trucks are symptomatic of the power of money in Guyana. Multi-billion-dollar companies own those trucks. And money talks loudly and graphically in Guyana.
In the most capitalistic countries in the world those container-trucks would not be allowed to be part of the morning down town traffic rush. They would be regulated. The famous Royston King said, about a year ago, that City Hall plans to regulate the hours of these vehicles on the road. Ask me if I believe that. Ask me why I think that policy would never be implemented.
When I reached in the vicinity of Crane/Vreed-en-Hoop, there were more traffic woes because the road there is being widened and the civilian workers are not trained to regulate traffic and where to place the cones. Drivers had to follow the line of cones but at a certain section, the cones went out of order and I almost came head on with a minibus going in the opposite direction.
When I reached the cremation site, Michelle Ramsaroop’s pyre was about to be lit. My deepest condolences to Gerhard Ramsaroop, whose father, Boyo, was partly responsible for me escaping “nowhere-land” in Wortmanville.

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