After Krauss, questions a nation must but won’t ask

Aug 04, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

I have spent my entire life in struggle in this country. I know no other life but one of struggle. It started out when I was sixteen. I am in my mid-sixties and yet I am still involved. It has not been a pleasant journey, because when you have a family they suffer too as a result of your praxis. Next February would be forty years of marriage to Janet Kissoon, and both she and my daughter have had to suffer from my activism.
Looking back over those fifty years I cannot say and will not say I know my country and that I have seen the fruits of my sacrifice. A better word to use would be results. I see my sacrifice and I see the results and what I see is a country that hasn’t changed in moral, philosophical, humane ways since my journey began almost fifty years ago.
In 2018, Guyana is different from when my radicalism began, but is different in the large buildings, fast food restaurants, smart phones, internet, ATM cards etc. But those things do not define a nation. The possession of a soul, the instincts of humanity, the philosophical fulcrums on which a country rest, I don’t see in Guyana.
Mr. Krauss described Guyana using terms that the outsider will feel is a country yet to take its place in the modern world. Mr. Krauss’ playbook was replete with stereotypical, cultural bias that Third World scholars have long understood through the brilliance of our own scholars of which for me Edward Said’s book, Orientalism, stands out.
Krauss was wrong in countless ways, but deep in the Freudian walls of the minds of the Guyanese people, Krauss picked up on a country that is hopelessly backward. But the frightening thing about this awareness that Krauss is right, is that we who accept that Krauss is right, brought into being the canvas that Krauss painted. We can stop another Krauss coming in another year, but will we?
There is so much that is profoundly disturbing and deeply scary about my country that sometimes I wonder if I threw away fifty years of my life and did an immense wrong in marrying and bringing a kid on board. For me, Guyana is not your average fallen down country. It is a formation that stands outside universal civilization. To offer the picture you do not know where to start.
I was trained as an historian and I went on to study philosophy, and that combination offers you a powerful insight into understanding the evolution of people living together in community. One of the values that civilization enjoys is academia. The university has always been one of the most beautiful values civilization gave to its citizens. People love university life and do not want to part with it. It is a universal spirit in youth. Not so in Guyana. On my parents’ grave, I swear that in my 26 years as an academic at UG, there has not been one student that I asked, who told me he/she loved UG. The refrain in my 26 years went like this – “Mr. Kissoon, I can’t wait to get out.”
The concept of service drives all nations. From ancient times to the present, service is what humans living together in community expect. In Guyana, service is a debased value and its almost non-existent life tortures and torments the people of this country. Since the state is coterminous with society then when state service disappears, service disappearances nation-wide.
In every sphere of activity in this country, service is either deplorable, accompanied by vexation, and the receiver is treated as if they are mere servants wanting something. There is hardly an exception. Guyana has the most crass and crude medical doctors, who mistreat patients. Nurses are the same. NIS employees are the same. Bank employees are the same. Public sector attendants are the same and this takes in all ministries, all public sector organizations; university lecturers are the same.
Private and state security personnel, male and female, higher and lower ranks operate as if the people they serve are their slaves that they can talk down to. From President through to Prime Minister down to ministers and permanent secretaries, they do not put value on service to people. They treat citizens with condescending attitudes. Clients have to run after their lawyers.
In the private sector, a CEO never takes a call unless it is from a prominent citizen. This columnist once spoke directly to Prime Ministers, Michael Manley of Jamaica and Olof Palme of Sweden. Never, never, would an ordinary person have that delight in Guyana. Krauss was partially right and partially wrong. What he was right about is spreading like wildfire.

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