“Fit and proppa” as an election slogan? Really!

Oct 23, 2018 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Trying to understand the people of this country is an impossible endeavour. The more you live here the more you see how incomprehensible the mentality of the Guyanese nationality is. One should not doubt the occurrence of any bizarre or impossible action in Guyana because this is Guyana where nothing is what it seems and everything you see is not what it is.
In all seriousness, why would you give a student 800 Guyanese dollars as a prize for excellence in their academic work? In the Guyanese economy of 2016 (the year my daughter received it), what could $800G buy? Would it not have been sensible to do what most universities do – give a book award?
That student would cherish that book forever. That was not the end of the story. The head of the Ontario Guild of UG Graduates that offers the prize money each year wrote a public letter of response to say in previous years, the parents of students who received the sum were grateful. Is that true? Yes it is. This is Guyana.
Why would a magistrate sentence an accused to three years for possession of a spent shell he found on the road? There are hundreds of spent shells on the beach of the Eve Leary, Atlantic Ocean. I see them often while working my dog. Why a jail term for a spent shell and not possession of a pen? A pen can be used to rob people. If you go up to your intended victim, point the pen to his/her eye and say “gimme yuh money or I gon juck yuh,” you are likely to succeed.
If you go to your intended victim, open your palm, show him/her the spent shell and say, “gimme yuh money or I gun use did pon yuh,” you will be laughed at. Seriously, is there another country in the world that would sentence an accused to three years jail for one spent shell the accused found on the roadway? Please identify that country for me.
I read the other day that a homeless man appeared in court for stealing mangoes from the tree in a school yard. Really! That incident reached the courts? The police have nothing better to do with their time. That magistrate had nothing better to do with her time. The country’s treasury does not have money to meet our teachers’ demands but we spend money on paper work for preparing a case jacket for a homeless man accused of stealing mangoes. And of course he spent the night in jail where the next morning he had to be fed.
The police are called in to restore order in the highest and most important institution in the land – Parliament. The opposition members prevent the police from doing their duty and one parliamentarian runs to the media in tears saying that the police brutalized her. But no cell phone cameras and no television cameras can verify her claim.
Yet she was not even censured much less charged. While the police were trying to resist the parliamentarians who were attacking them, some of the opposition members were shouting, “rape, rape, rape!”
To this day we don’t know who the police tried to rape. One parliamentary employee told me the intended rape victim was a man who is a self-styled bishop. I told her I don’t believe that. Another employee informed me that the police did make a move on a parliamentarian with the nickname, “Satyraa Gyall” and that was when the rape exclamation was made. I don’t believe that either. All of this happened in the parliament of a country named Guyana.
In which country a political party is contesting an election and its slogan is, “fit and proppa?” Elections at both the central and local levels are about power. They are serious business in a country in which people’s daily lives are affected for better or worse. How can you ask citizens to vote for you and you reduce the pursuit of power to effect positive changes by a nonsensically facetious slogan as “fit and proppa?”
What does a headmistress or headmaster tell his/her sixteen-year-old child at the breakfast table when they assess the contestants and one party has as its slogan, “fit and proppa?” Should the electorate take that party seriously?
Elections are the most important act a citizen participate in at the national level and there are literally a billion ways you can come up with a slogan that would galvanize their emotions. That slogan has to have a touch of poetry and philosophy in it. Is the AFC fit and proper to contest the elections?

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