Sadly, there is no commonsensical voice to intervene

Mar 02, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

There is a recent published letter in KN by a person named, Michael Abraham. I was delighted to read it. I smiled when I read it. But underneath my satisfaction was raging anger. These things do not happen in the real world. These things do not happen in a nation where lots of people are educated. If they do, then an eerie thing explains this country.
Abraham makes a valid complaint about a lack of commonsense, not on the part of some foolish ten-year-old child but a Government agency. Here we go.
Carifesta Avenue has now been bifurcated into two with one way traffic on each lane. Naturally there is a concrete division in the middle called a median. The National Park on Carifesta Avenue has two gates – eastern and western. If you come from the east, you enter through the eastern gate. If you come from the west, you enter from the gate that also serves Burrowes School of Art.
Here now is high stupidity as perpetrated on this country by the Ministry of Public Infrastructure.
Bear up with a small digression. I opposed the performance of Robeson Benn as Minister of Public Works. Benn even threatened to sue me over a critical column on his ministry. One Sunday night, tempers flared between us when he came into Kaieteur News. Adam Harris came between us (I think I would have lost the fistic encounter.)
I would never have believed that there could have been more imbecility and irrationality practised by that same ministry after Benn’s party lost the 2015 elections. I state unambiguously, the Ministry of Public Infrastructure has the smallest amount of commonsense among all the ministries.
Back to Carifesta Avenue. Now naturally there has to be an opening in the median for drivers to enter the park and Burrowes School. The Ministry of Public Infrastructure did not put the cut in the median there. The passage was placed up the road not at the western gate of the National Park but east of Burrows School; at the entrance to the eastern gate of the National Park.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the cut being at the eastern gate. So you are traveling east on Carifesta Avenue, you turn into Burrowes School and the park at the opening which leads to the eastern gate. Remember the western gate is not accessible because of the median. Here is more stupidity for you. The eastern gate of the National Park is permanently closed. And how do I know this? I use the place every morning.
So you turn into the opening in the median but you cannot enter the eastern gate; it is locked. So you have to do a dangerous thing. You have to make a wide turn into the southern lane of Carifesta Avenue and drive unto the parapet to get to the western gate to enter Burrowes School.
Mr. Abraham puts it this way; “… They constructed a median which made it impossible for east bound traffic to enter the gate of the car park without making a sharp U turn into the westbound traffic. Those who use this road regularly know the high speed at which vehicles travel here. It is an absolutely high risk to manoeuvre this turn.
The amount of glass shards on this turn is testimony to the risk to life and limb to make this turn…Why can’t both gates be opened? The simple act of opening that second gate will make life immeasurably easier and safer for users of the National Park.”
This is just another manifestation of a country where you have to look hard to find rationality. Why the ministry did not put the cut in the median at the entrance that leads into the park and Burrowes School? That is stupidity number one. Stupidity number two – why not open the other gate? This is just one example of the horror show this country was, is and will be.
Why close off a main street in Georgetown to paint road signs at the rush hour? I would like to remind you of an action that I once wrote about last year. This one will never occur elsewhere on Planet Earth.
The very ministry closed off traffic on the Railway Embankment for three months to rehabilitate the Liliendaal bridge. Two days after traffic was allowed on the completion of the bridge, they closed the roadway again. Guess for what? You are never ever going to believe the reason – to clean the trench. So why not when the road was closed? Because commonsense, logical thinking and rationality most tragically have disappeared.

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