Guyoil: Isn’t there at least one minister that can see this?

May 24, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

When the PPP came in power in 1992, the essential PPP from the fifties was dead and gone. It was a new PPP with only Cheddi and Janet Jagan. All the big names that were ministers, academics, business people and supporters in the sixties had left. The impressive list of such persons was long. By the time the nineties had arrived, only Reepu Daman Persaud and Philomena Shury were known names left from the seventies.
The PPP Government in power in 1992 consisted of young apparatchiks that the Jagans protégéd from the eighties. They were mostly from the countryside and not educated or experienced. Strangely enough, two of them from the seventies were not made ministers – Navin Chandarpal and Donald Ramotar. These inexperienced cadres made terrible mistakes, some of which remain to this day. One glaring example is the Sheriff Street location of the Guyoil filling station.
Simply put; the location was silly, unnecessary and dangerous. One would have thought that after seeing all these mistakes, the new APNU+AFC regime, with far more experienced specialists around it, would revoke these terrible missteps of the PPP administration.
The Sheriff Street Guyoil is an act of immense engineering stupidity in one of the largest Caribbean countries, where space is absolutely no problem. Why that spot was chosen, I don’t know and I never read any commentary about it; for or against.
If you have lived in Guyana since that gas station went up, you cannot not miss the traffic insanity. The entity is located on the western side of Sheriff Street at the junction with David Street and the Railway Embankment. You get to the station to fill up from travelling north on Sheriff Street. If you are going south on Sheriff, it is impossible to turn into the station because the northbound traffic is non-stop, and when such northbound traffic has to stop because of the red light, you still cannot turn in because the long northbound lane stretches way past the station, so you cannot turn.
Here are three more nightmares about this madness. One is that there is no separate lane on Sheriff Street for turning into the place. If you are going to fill up and there are cars in front of you, you are actually waiting to enter on the lane that is for drivers turning west into David Street. So if you are travelling north on Sheriff Street to turn into David Street and Guyoil has a waiting queue, then you cannot move.
The second nightmare is that you drive in, you fill up, and now you are leaving. Where are you going? There is no place to go when you leave the station. Remember you have to get back on Sheriff Street to leave. This means you have to join the ongoing traffic going north on Sheriff Street. But wait! Even if a civilized driver allows you to go onto Sheriff Street, what happens when you are leaving and there is the red light? This means you cannot exit and confusion ensures, because other drivers behind want to exit the station too, but there are several cars on Sheriff Street waiting for the green light.
The third nightmare is related to number two – once you are stuck because of the traffic, there is no parking space as there is at the Kitty and Regent Street branches.
Some fool (and please forgive the brutish language, but this is Guyana) with power in this country has decided to pull down the gas station and rebuild it right on that insane junction. When I saw the station’s content had gone, I told the security at DSL supermarket, right opposite the station, that it was time they move the entity because for all the engineering reasons in the world, the station was dangerously located. But the guard told me as far as he knows, it is being reconstructed.
You mean to tell me there isn’t at least one engineer with influential contacts within the government that can explain to the Cabinet that the gas station should not be there? You mean to tell me that there isn’t at least one powerfully placed leader in the corridors of power to at least bring up the subject with the Cabinet?
There has got to be an answer as to why the leadership of this nation cannot produce at least one, just one, thinking person. But here is the sad part. The President and Prime Minister will never get caught in the traffic madness there. Their outriders and their blaring sirens normally clear the traffic.

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