Profits, aesthetics and President Granger

Dec 08, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Presidents and prime ministers are irritating people. If you are an activist or analyst and you are involved in politics then if you are not married, get married and have some children so that they can provide a cushion against the anger presidents and prime ministers will bring to you. If you do not want marriage or children, then lose yourself in the company of your friends or pets, because presidents and prime ministers will send you mad once you are involved in social activism or write about them.
The reason is simple. The things they say and do are so unbearable that if you are not strong they can demolish your Freudian fortress. They never fail to rile you up, make you uncontrollably emotional, get you extremely angry. It happens all the time in all countries; Guyana is no exception. Even in France with so much expected of Macron, he has started his nonsense with some anti-working class moves.
In Guyana, from our first executive president, Forbes Burnham to our current one, David Granger, they play to the foreign gallery while doing abysmal nonsense at home. Burnham took the world stage by storm becoming a colossal supporter of African liberation movement yet as early as 1974, a mere eight years after Independence, Burnham refused to employ at UG one of the colossal thinkers in the historiography of African liberation, Walter Rodney.
On the world stage, Burnham would preach freedom and liberation but there were no such things at home. He told the UN; “Guyana shares with her friends, an active and undying dedication to democracy…”
It was the same with his successor, Desmond Hoyte. Hoyte engineered perhaps the cruelest anti-people structural adjustment system a post-colonial government ever pursued named the Economic Recovery Programme, yet, when he was at foreign forums he spoke about the people of Guyana.
Hoyte had his own meaning of what people meant; for him it didn’t mean the masses.
Cheddi Jagan succeeded Hoyte and immediately birthed a doctrine named the New Global Human Order. He proclaimed it at a speech at the UN in which he said the UN must address the fundamental problems which he listed as; “the alleviation of poverty, the expansion of productive employment….”
But back home the Cheddi Jagan government initiated the most extensive extirpation of public servant employment ever in the English-speaking Caribbean. At the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Customs and Excise, Dr. Jagan almost emptied the buildings.
For one dozen years, Bharrat Jagdeo ruled Guyana. In what must be the most bizarre expression of hypocrisy in any governmental leader anywhere in the world at any time in history, Mr. Jagdeo went to the UN and committed Guyana to a pollution free world.
The UN in turn, in recognition of this laudable goal of Jagdeo, awarded him the UN title of Champion of the Environment. This was a Head of Government/State that presided over perhaps the dirtiest capital city in the entire world.
To see Georgetown was to see a capital city that if you were a visitor from another planet, you had to conclude it was a country that had gone through barbaric ravishes of war caused by the destruction of an invading force. I lived through Jagdeo’s era and I lived through the ubiquitous miasma that overran Georgetown, but as an activist and analyst I didn’t lose my mind because there was the cushion of family, pets and friends.
It seems that the UN is the favourite place for Guyana’s presidents to mouth off. At a UN forum in Kenya this week, Mr. Granger told his audience that people come before profits. Quite a wise saying that all heads of government must embrace and keep in the core of their hearts. But it is this same president that puts profits and aesthetics before people, and unlike Desmond Hoyte’s definition of people, by people I mean, those that are not wealthy or rich.
Mr. Granger must have known that the City Council was moving over a hundred vendors from the Stabroek Square to facilitate the Golden Jubilee of Independence with the float parade occupying the space from which the vendors were chased away. Mr. Granger must know his government couldn’t afford to give public servants a bonus, but millions of dollars were spent to adorn the country with the billboards of the visage of the Finance Minister and his 2018 budget. It is Mr. Granger’s government that will pay a certain contractor monies he says are owed rather than contest the controversial sums in a court of law. It comes back to Hoyte. What is Granger’s definition of people?

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Profits, aesthetics and President Granger

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