My best column the past five years

Jan 03, 2021 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – “Until one has loved an animal, a part of one’s soul remains unawakened.”(Anatole France)
All columnists and interviewers have their number one piece; the one they consider their best. My choice that was my best effort in the past five years was done in 2016. It was a moment of piercing and lacerating emotions because of the subject matter.
It was at that time that I was no longer prepared to tolerate the APNU+AFC running my country. It was at that time, I discovered that David Granger as president was unfit to be president and was in fact on the top of a pyramid of a philistine regime. It was a time too that I discovered that the Guyanese people were unfit to be part of a universal and civilized society.
Before I come to that, let me return to an incident that I have touched on several times. I thought that was the particular issue that caused me to decide that the post 2015 dispensation was decayed beyond rotting and should be removed from power. The anger in me because of that particular situation generated in me a desire to change the 2015 government of the PNC, AFC and WPA who combined their depravity and degeneracy in a deadly cocktail of sick power intoxication and volcanic immorality.
I will briefly describe it because I have been through it so many times on this page. A day after the 2015 election results, the AFC leadership gathered in their head office to pick personalities to fill their slots of Cabinet posts. They called a woman on the phone, who was not an AFC member, not an AFC campaigner, not an AFC activist, not an AFC office visitor, not an AFC financier, and offered her the Ministry of the Environment. It caused a psychic laceration in the second-tier leadership of the AFC, some of whom spoke to me with tears in their eyes one day over lunch at Le Excellence restaurant on Charlotte Street in Lacytown.
I thought that was the defining moment for me as to how I saw the post-2015 dispensation until an incident at the Ogle Airport. Here is my choice of the column that I would consider numero uno the past five years. It was published on Wednesday, December 14, 2016 titled, “The puppies were killed because Mr. Gomes did not keep his promise.”
I hope you can find it on the internet. You should be able to, if not call me on my cell phone at 614-5927 or contact me at my email address [email protected] and I will respond by attaching the original copy in my file. I am not going to discuss the contents of that commentary because space would not allow for it. But here is a brief description.
The Guyana Livestock and Development Authority (GLDA) and the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) were killing puppies and dogs when they arrived at the airport from the interior with their owners. The GLDA and GRA insisted that the owners must state which of the 10 Regions the puppies came from or which country. Failure to provide documentation resulted in the animals being killed through lethal injection.
I will never ever forget that Saturday night in the office of Kaieteur News. A gold miner came in with his two assistants and told us that he just saved his dog from execution because GLDA and GRA were insisting that unless he brings some evidence of the dog being a Guyanese pet it will be put to death. There and then he chartered a flight to the interior and brought the mother of the puppy for officials of GLDA and GRA to see.
The miner could have afforded it but what happened to the pets whose owners couldn’t afford the flight back to the interior? This story was carried in the Kaieteur News of Monday, November 28, 2016. Even after Kaieteur News carried the story, the killings continued. So disgusted with this bestiality of the GLDA, GRA and the APNU+AFC government, the state-owned Chronicle featured the story with photographs of the killed puppies.
Shocking to know that there was no outcry from the nation. There was no intervention from people in the government, some of whom said that when they wake up in the morning they listen to a bit of classical music. I guess you can describe someone as “a philistine that listens to classical music.” I believe the head of the GRA, Mr. Godfrey Statia, is an American citizen and would know that you can’t dare kill animals in that fashion at any airport in the US. Ironically, it was the veterinary doctors that did the killings.

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