Stop renting fantastic houses for these mediocre UN personnel

Aug 15, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News- I was in Miami in 2000 for an eye operation at the Bascom Palmer Eye Hospital. Hold your horses! I could not afford then and still cannot afford foreign medical bills. In case you missed it, I said on my programme – the Gildarie-Freddie Kissoon Show – last Friday night that I have not had an elevation in salary for almost 13 years as a columnist.

I said that publicly without malice and I don’t think anyone will take umbrage at it. I did say on the show that I could not see the owner of Kaieteur News objecting to my declaration because it is the truth and it concerns my life so why should I hide that fact as a public figure. Gildarie and I were discussing the escalating cost of living.

My hospital facilitation was done through Father Andrew Morrison, then editor of the Catholic Standard. As I waited for my passport to be stamped by the African-American immigration officer, I became impatient. The gentleman was interrogating two elderly Vietnamese couple.

The interrogation went on and on. The immigration guy was hassling these two people. I watched at him with angry eyes. The next day, I was using the metromover to get to the hospital and there was “Mr. Immigration” sitting on the train in total obscurity. In American society, he was a nobody.

In the Third World, these diplomats come and people go crazy over them, thinking they are special when they are simply non-entities in their own countries. When they go back home, they live in very ordinary houses.

Last week, I saw a senior citizen came out of his car, walked on the Eve Leary seawall and stopped to buy an item from one of the vendors. No one looked at him. This was a multi-millionaire in American dollars. This man could buy any mansion in the US. He is simply an unassuming man.

Mediocre UN officials come here and live in rented mansions the ambience of which they will never see for the rest of their lives when they go back to their home-country.

In my compound, directly from my house, there lived the head of the UN Refugee Agency in Guyana. That mansion has to go at three million dollars monthly. This is a huge structure. I say with unmitigated inflexibility, that person will never see that kind of opulence in her life once she returns home. That lady never used even a tenth of that mansion because of its size.

Guess who pays the rent for all the extraordinary houses UN personnel live in? The state and it amounts to hundreds of millions annually. Two weeks ago, the lady was moving out. This UN official came up to my car as I drove into my gate. He told me that a container is coming to move the lady’s personal stuff and it is huge and will take up the entire width of the street and parapet.

He suggested that the three households that will be affected should park further up the road and leave our vehicles there overnight because we will not have access to drive out for two days.

In the early days at Kaieteur News, when someone said something stupid, we would say, “yuh smoking conga pump.” Well, this UN guy was smoking something weirder than gonga pump. I told him one thing and one thing only – he had to get permission from the police to do that and I know that was impossible to get since the police will not subscribe to such lawlessness.

I immediately phoned the two neighbours that would be affected and they were livid. The lady came up to me and I told her that was not going to happen. I told her she had to find alternative arrangements.

The incredible rental for houses for UN officials hit the news channels last week when it was revealed that just one landlord would collect two billion dollars from his property over a 10-year period.

There needs to be a forensic audit ordered by Cabinet into how feasible it is to go on renting these mansions that run into hundreds of millions each year. Do we recoup that sum in resources the UN offers this country? The role of the UN was laid bare in this land during the five months of election drama.

One would have expected the UN resident representative to have been in the forefront in the advocacy of free and fair elections. During those five months, the UN resident emissary was almost invisible and almost silent.

(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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Stop renting fantastic houses for these mediocre UN personnel

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