Read about your country Michael; tell me how you feel

Apr 12, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

AFC parliamentarian, Michael Carrington, is a personal friend. He was a friend ages before the AFC was born. “Carry” as I call him will be a friend long after the AFC vanishes from the landscape of Guyana. I will always be grateful to “Carry”.
When I was attacked at midnight outside Parliament building, after leaving the vigil for the three victims shot by police over the electricity hike protest in Linden in 2012, it was “Carry” who saved my life through his confrontation with the hit man.
Last week, “Carry” told me he has no objection when I criticize Guyana’s politicians and rulers but he is uneasy when I attack the country itself.
I explained to him that a country is what it is because rulers and other people give it the shape it has. Guyana has some terrible characteristics and they remain embedded in the fabric of Guyana because leaders and other people are responsible.
Guyana is a country where you must produce an envelope with your address on it with a post office date stamp in order to post a parcel. Isn’t that an example of a backward country?
If “Carry” wants to send a parcel to his sister in Trinidad and he hasn’t got an envelope to show he cannot send stuff to his sister.
My daughter is studying in Europe and she asked me to post some books for her. I cannot do that. I don’t have an envelope with my name that someone posted to me. Why should I not criticize such a terrible society?
Drivers from Corentyne going to the US and Canadian embassies on Young Street had to detour when they reach Young Street at the junction with Camp Road because a sign directed you away from Young Street because “the road is under repair.”
The funny thing was that the sign was misleading because four years before, the road was repaired and opened. This sign, which indicated that Guyana was wasteland, was deliberately misleading drivers not familiar with Georgetown.
It was the personal intervention of this columnist with Sherod Parkinson of the relevant ministry that got the sign taken down last December.
Criticizing Guyana doesn’t mean you don’t love your country. I ask “Carry” and others to keep reading what Guyana is like and they will see what a mess this country is. We read about the disaster that occurred last week at Freeburg School in Werk-en-Rust.
I played in the yard at that school when I was a six year old boy, jumping over the fence with friends many times in the night to steal the metal washers from the posts of the fence to play “chink,” a game that has gone out of existence.
The school had to be closed because the toilets on the lower flat were non-functioning for years. Mosquitoes took over the building and teachers at this time of the year when exams are gone, had to mark books on the parapet.
How can a school not have washrooms? And when they have washrooms, you have, as a matter of commonsense, employ cleaners during working hours to keep them clean. I never saw clean washrooms in my 26 years as a staff member at UG.
I visited Wales Secondary School with Mark Benschop ten years ago, and the toilet block was overrun with bushes. That is not civilization.
I don’t care if I am accused of offending President Granger but I have given him the nickname, “The Enquirer.” He implements commissions of enquiry all the time but he needs a commission into judicial sentencing.
This country has the most bizarre sentencing structure that has reduced it to a chasm of extreme cruelty. Judicial sentencing has exposed what a Faustian land of sadistic, Mephistophelean rituals this land of zombies has become.
Judicial sentencing in this country takes one back to early primitive times when human life was swatted away like flies. In the US, you make a legal procedure, which is quite known throughout the world —plea bargain.
The essential function of plea bargain on the part of an accused is to avoid getting the full penalty if found guilty. In former British colonies, we have what is known as the lesser plea.
That is when you plead guilty to murder, you are sentenced for manslaughter. It is simply shocking and that is putting it mildly how many accused guilty of heinous, sadistic murders are given light sentences when even the lesser pleas should fetch a harsher penalty.
The latest one is a man who killed a woman by lashing her in her head. He got five years. This is Guyana, Michael Carrington.

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Read about your country Michael; tell me how you feel

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