Election campaign is on show and so are Guyana’s tragedies

Jan 17, 2020 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Do you know that 95 percent of the bodies dancing and gyrating in front of the speakers of the two major parties – PPP and APNU+AFC — will not be able to receive adequate modern medical treatment for serious ailments in Guyana?
Yet they are clamouring for these politicians to rule them that will rule them country and as the years go by, these very politicians will get sick, pay for expensive treatment in foreign countries while they wait for endless hours at the public hospitals.
When the election cycle comes around again in 2025, they will gyrate and dance once again. Poor people have a permanent destiny with self-destruction.
The announcement by PM candidate for Change Guyana, Mr. Nigel Hinds, that his diabetes problem is too serious to rely on treatment here in Guyana highlights once again how the ordinary man and woman in this land are condemned to see a dim future.
Mr. Hinds’s statement brings in focus once more, questionable medicine delivery in a country where the two major parties have ruled Guyana for more than seventy years.
Mr. Jagdeo ruled Guyana longer than the combined presidencies of Cheddi Jagan and his wife, yet when he left office through his control of the Ramotar presidency in 2015, medicine delivery was far from adequate and remains so almost five years into the tenure of APNU+AFC.
It is no secret, in fact it is known throughout the length and breadth of this country that our rulers will hop on a plane, paid for by the state and receive medical treatment in foreign lands paid too by the state.
Several ministers over the fifteen years of Jagdeo’s tenure did this. Since it came into power, the APNU+AFC mandarins have been doing the same.
Where are the deliveries in medicine, utility service, educational facilities? My daughter did two degrees at UG, then, she went to a British university to do her Masters twenty times larger than UG with twenty times the number of staff and students.
When she graduated, within days, the university had the students’ certificates ready. I doubt she can get her UG certificate within one month much less one week.
This is the state of a country where politicians from both sides of the fence have had their chances, let down the ordinary man and woman yet these classes of folks are out there waiting in their thousands to vote for politicians who have virtually no patriotic love for the country that they have ruled and wants to rule once more.
I stood outside the DSL supermarket at the junction of Sherriff Street and the Railway Embankment last Monday and watched the helpless look on the face of a mother whose car was struck by another driver because of the jungle that has replaced the traffic signals at that crazy junction.
The signals have been out since the December 14, 2018.
She was all flustered and couldn’t speak. But what traumatised me was her little daughter who couldn’t comprehend the reality around her and was crying uncontrollably.
This is life in the 21st century in Guyana and people are going to flock in prodigious numbers to vote for politicians who did what I will describe below.
President Jagdeo, in a moment of intellectual bankruptcy for which he should have been banished from this country, took US$60 million and built a hotel rather than put that precious sum into medicine delivery.
As soon as David Granger came to power in 2015, money was poured into a project named D’Urban Park.
To this day, we don’t know the figures involved but the consensus is that it is more than a billion dollars. In justifying the project, David Patterson, Minister of Public Infrastructure, said in 2016 that the attendees for the Golden Jubilee of the 50th Independence anniversary could not be accommodated at the National Stadium or the National Park.
Just reflect on that statement and you will see why the Georgetown Public Hospital cannot provide modern medical facilities, why blackouts visit us daily, why a UG student cannot get a transcript within a month of an application for one.
It is interesting to note that all three of the names mentioned here – Jagdeo, Granger and Patterson- are on the campaign trail urging poor, ordinary working class Guyanese to put them in power back again.
Juxtapose the service we get from the Georgetown public Hospital, UG, GPL, GWI with the appearance of the vehicles, which our past and present rulers drive. Let me finish with my favourite, French term I ended with in so many columns – “God is dead, Marx is dead and I’m not feeling too well myself.”

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