Oil money cannot buy commonsense and competence

Dec 22, 2019 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Let’s pick a date at random – a weeknight in the third week of August. That is not a holiday on the Guyanese calendar. Schools are always closed at that time. Since it is during the week, people have to work the next day, so unlike a Friday evening, traffic will not be nightmarish.
Juxtapose that day in the week with four days before Christmas. If you have 10, 000 cars competing with each other to cross without working traffic lights in an ordinary night in late August, the volume of cars four days before Christmas in the year 2019 will be five times more, that is, 50,000.
It has to be the most incomprehensibly senseless government on Planet Earth to have failed traffic lights at some of the busiest intersections four days before Christmas. It has to be an incredibly useless government not to concentrate on seeing that these frightening junctions have working signals at this time of the year. Come on man, this is commonsense.
On Friday evening, the signals were not working at Sheriff Street and the Railway Embankment, and UG Road and the Railway Embankment. Come on man, it is commonsense to know that with MovieTowne and Giftland Mall, there is going to be heavy traffic around these junctions at this time of the year.
What I saw at these two intersections on Friday night was simply terrifying. No nation should treat its people like this. No one should allow their government to reduce them to savages. What I saw at those two junctions without the traffic signals was virtually nightmarish. What I saw last Friday must be top of the agenda on the mind of every voter.
I was literally afraid to drive across the Railway Embankment from the southern part of UG Road to the northern section. I was really frozen and drivers behind me were insanely blowing their horns on me, but I was afraid of being hit because no one was willing to be civilised.
That was only half of my nightmare. I didn’t know the signals at Sheriff Street and the Embankment had stopped working. It was when I approached the junction, I saw the madness. The only choice was to make a left, that is, a southern turn into Sheriff Street from the Embankment. I was going over to David Street, but crossing over was literally impossible. Come on man, this cannot be happening four days before Christmas
Imagine a 22-year-old student studying abroad in Europe or Canada or the US, returned home and was in the car with her mom at the wheel and got caught in that concrete jungle, and witnessed her mother panicking to manoeuvre through that madness. When she graduates, she is not coming back to Guyana.
I ask in all sincerity: how can any set of rulers be so idiotic not to monitor the traffic signals at this time of the year? Come on man, not four days before Christmas.
The talk is non-stop that money will be pouring in from oil, but oil wealth cannot buy commonsense and competence. There are leaders in this country that lack commonsense to know that with the deluge of vehicles in Guyana there is going to be a huge number of vehicles on the roadways at this time of the year.
Come on man, this is commonsense. These leaders have to know that their technicians have to be monitoring the situation during this time of the year.
What is even sadder is that people accept this morbid incompetence from their leaders. When I opposed the PPP and I saw the non-functioning traffic signals all over Georgetown, I knew we had to change the PPP. I say in all sincerity, I could never have imagined that after we voted out the incompetent PPP, we would enter a period of infrastructural stagnation.
I say in all sincerity, I would never have imagined the kind of incompetence we saw at the Ministry of Public Works under the PPP, we would see continue under this government. No one could have convinced me that the traffic signal nonsense Guyanese endured under the PPP would be ubiquitous under this government. What went wrong?
I told Mark Benschop in a radio interview that the City Engineer’s office was a better, functioning unit under the PPP with Carol Sooba than Royston King.
Look what the Commission of Inquiry discovered. And that is under the current government. I travel all over Georgetown and the ugliness of overgrown bushes and ubiquitous garbage heaps are identical with the scenes under the incompetent PPP. Really, what happened after 2015?

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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