Latest update January 17th, 2025 6:30 AM
Nov 01, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
On Monday last, I was running late to go to Berbice, so I left the Camp Street beach in a hurry with my dog to reach home. I got caught in the morning rush hour traffic right outside the passport office (it was about 8.30 am). I stared at the office, because the sight was strange. There were only three persons on the stairway. As the traffic moved off, two more persons went up the stairs.
I drove away in disbelief. Rewind the tape to 2014. Those three persons I saw at 8.30 in the morning would have been three hundred. It would appear that the long and winding queue to just apply for a passport is gone. It makes you wonder what kind of people the PPP leadership were when they ruled Guyana. Those lines at the passport office lasted the entire period of Jagdeo’s hegemony – August 1999 – April 2015.
What did the PPP leaders do with their time, that in those fifteen years, hundreds of persons lined up for the simple act of applying for a passport on a daily basis?
After my journey in Berbice was over, as we were leaving, I asked to visit Moleson Creek since I haven’t been by the ferry terminus since 2000, the last year I taught at the Berbice campus of UG. The environment that envelopes the Moleson Creek ferry area is uninviting. Surinamese tourists coming and leaving will see a welcoming billboard that is disgraceful.
Its face is disfigured. A first-time visitor from Suriname will obviously notice the billboard; you know what they say about first impression. The housing compound built for security personnel when the ferry service began at Moleson Creek has outlived its usefulness. One of the houses has been overrun by wood-ants and the entire western front is rapidly deteriorating. In many countries, the lower income people live in better dwellings than what the police officers at the Moleson Creek ferry service area have to cope with.
I left for Berbice on Monday morning reflecting on how the PPP ruled this country, and in Berbice on that day were more painful manifestations for which you simply cannot blame the present government. Those houses at Moleson Creek came into those terrible conditions long before there was a change of government in May 2015. But read on, there is more evidence as to why the PPP should not be returned to office.
I went to Number 51 village police station to enquire about the status of an AFC youth from Georgetown who encountered trouble at a police roadblock at Whim, the Sunday night after coming from the AFC birthday anniversary celebration at Whim Cricket Ground. He was arrested the night and placed in the lock-up. I want to say in all sincerity if my dog had to be placed in that lock-up, I would die. This is a very small room in which the feces has overflowed from the toilet and has occupied about a quarter of the cell. The toilet has not been cleaned for God knows when.
How could the police put anyone in that cell? How could any country put one of its citizens who has been arrested for a non-violent crime in that cell? What has this country become? Is there another police holding cell like that in the Caricom countries.
Is it possible these cells throughout Guyana are like that? A businessman friend of mine, stopped for a traffic offence coming from the same AFC celebration, was also put in that cell, in the presence of his wife.
Now here is the last encounter before I left Berbice on Monday afternoon. It is the ongoing tragedy of a nation named Guyana. Asst. Superintendant John Singh was very professional and courteous. He was offended at the way the police were shouted on by the AFC youth, but he was not the vindictive sort. He thought the youth was misguided and he accepted our apologies. I met Singh at Springlands Police Station.
The bail refund receipt was signed there and we had to collect the refund at Number 51 police station.
Now read this. The officer to return the bail money and sign off the papers had gone to New Amsterdam Police Station. I am from Georgetown, and he was asking me to come back on Tuesday (yesterday) to collect the bail money, and it had to be Tuesday, since on Tuesday afternoon the money will be sent to Georgetown. We abandoned the money.
There was one light side to the Berbice experience. I went to the top hotel and my ice cream came with a large dinner spoon. A dinner spoon to eat dessert?
Jan 17, 2025
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