I never lusted for la dolce vita

Aug 20, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Once again my home at Turkeyen on the Railway Embankment is in the news. It is featured in a huge PPP press release on my life and politics, and carried in full by the newspaper part-owned by Bharrat Jagdeo, for which there must be both SOCU and SARA scrutiny.

This was the PPP’s reaction to a column last week. In that article, I highlighted one of the most abominable manifestations of abuse of power and corruption that can be found anywhere in the world.

The PPP as the ruling party violated the law and the principles of morality and applied to the Ministry of Housing, under one of its own leaders, and received two house lots at Bath on which the PPP constructed its Region 5 party head office. In any other country there would have been legal redress to take back those two plots.

How can a ruling party purchase at a cost subsidized by the state, lands allocated by law for poor citizens to build dwelling houses and convert them to party offices? If that is not abuse of power and corruption then there can be no definition of what those two terms are.

In a long press release on my life and politics, an angry PPP (which makes me feel that my criticism of their time in government has been effective and they are trying to hit back) declared that I was a beneficiary of the great performance of the PPP in office. Because before the PPP came to power, I lived in my mother-in-law’s house in Wortmanville and it was during the PPP’s reign that I built a mansion.

I live in an upper working class home that hundreds of thousands of citizens must have seen since I moved out of Wortmanville ten years ago. It is right next to the Caricom Secretariat on the edge of the Railway Embankment.

At the time, the government mandated citizens to build five feet up after the great floods of 2005. I went up at eight feet so the car could park underneath my home. My house is two levels and is by any architectural definition, an upper working class home which any driver on the Railway Embankment can see for him/herself. If you call my place a middle class structure then by comparison those middle class houses you see all over Guyana are aristocratic constructions. Inside the home are contents that are not from a middle class décor.

My home does not have self contained bedrooms (my wife and daughter never insisted on such) except for the one for my aging mother-in-law who died two years ago. I do not have a guest bedroom. AFC Parliamentarian, Michael Carrington had to sleep on a folded cot in the living room when he stayed over.

The furniture in my home is far from middle class. I built that unit from money saved from the income my wife earned in her state job and my salary from UG. I started UG in 1986 until my contract was terminated in 2012. I ended those twenty six years at a salary of $188, 000. I happily drive a car I have owned since 2002.

I am happy with the life I live. I never lusted for la dolce vita. I live very modestly, dress modestly and eat modestly. I consider myself a working class boy from Wortmanville and my entire political life has been lived among the working class and my entire career as a social activist has been put in the service of the working people of my country. Many years ago, I wrote in these very columns that I do not socialize with moneyed people.

People with wealth judge their friends and the world by one standard – the possession of money. If you socialize with them and you cannot emulate their expensive, sybaritic, ostentatious (and even decadent) lifestyle, after awhile they lose respect for you and become condescending. I have seen that too many times with people I know. I have avoided that self-destructive pathway. I get my invitations, I quietly accept them, and would fail to turn up.

It is asininity beyond belief to say that it was because of the PPP I was able to build a mansion. When I read that part of the press release, I immediately decided to reply, because if there weren’t two attacks on my life, if my wife wasn’t victimized out of her state job, and if my UG contract was not terminated, maybe I could have been in a better position to acquire a fortune to build a mansion. I will make sure the PPP is not returned to power.

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