A disgraceful government

 
I do plan to write a short memoir but I know you are fed up with me because I keep saying that. But it will happen one day. If I do write that account of the interesting impacts on my life in my struggle for a free Guyana one of the experiences that will definitely be included; and I mean most definitely is the time I spent at the University of Toronto.
My experience there has led to me being very pessimistic about Guyana. During my time as a doctoral student at University of Toronto, I found the place be to be boring, as someone who came from a turbulent Third World county. University of Toronto has about ten times the number of students and staff combined than the University of Guyana, yet University of Toronto was a trouble free university.
There were no quarrels between staff and students and between staff/students against the administration. University of Toronto was a peaceful place where boredom was the order of the day if you were a radical looking for human rights causes.
When I became a staff member at the University of Guyana (UG), it was a culture shock. Nothing worked. Mischief, quarrels, victimization, endless complaints, high levels of human flaws and misery were the order of the day at UG. I spent twenty-six years at UG until my contract was terminated without a hearing and the tragedy continues.
The question I asked myself is why at the University of Toronto, with ten times the population of UG was that place a sea of tranquility and a tiny populated institution like UG was full of human nastiness? There is an answer. It lies in the effects of colonialism on Third World people. I am not an admirer of VS Naipaul but I could understand the way he felt when he disparaged the Caribbean as a place without creativity.
How in a small population like ours, could the state bureaucracy be so slow that it takes months for honest, decent humans to get what they deserve from the bureaucracy? What is most incomprehensible is that after twenty one years in power, Guyanese see this type of performance and will return these very incompetents to power.
How can humans be so stupid?
When you look at our population of 800,000 and you take into consideration that sixty percent of that is under thirty years old, and you throw in the thousands and thousands of children, then we have a small number of citizens that the state bureaucracy serves. We don’t have twelve public companies in Guyana.
We have a stock exchange that is the smallest in the world. We have a level of NIS contributors, taxpayers, vehicle owners, university students that are very small in comparison with our own neighbours like Jamaica, much less lands with millions and millions.
Yet the citizens of this country have to wait for years for the State to serve them. Do you know that hard-working citizens that served CARIFESTA are yet to be paid? Do you know that the CARIFESTA secretariat owes the Theatre Guild over a million dollars for services rendered?
It takes ages to get a document of any kind from the court system. It takes ages to get any document at all from the public bureaucracy. I read a letter in Tuesday’s paper by Mrs. Gem Madhoo-Nascimento that was shocking at the way the Government treat artists that want to use the National Cultural Centre (NCC).
This lady is not known for any type of political observation. But maybe she has had enough of Guyana’s disgraceful Government. Her letter paints a terrible picture of how the Government administers the NCC. As a lifelong human rights activist, I had no idea of this mistreatment. I would suggest every citizen read her complaints.
Just before Mrs. Madhoo-Nascimento published her letter, there was another one the day before written by thirty artists who performed in the recent National Drama Festival. These signatories complained bitterly at the very late payment for the performers who failed to get their incomes in time for the Christmas holiday. Up to now, according to the letter, monies are owed and some payments were short.
What would the PPP Government do if it had to deal with two million citizens? Obviously, it would have collapsed long ago. It still boggles the mind why a citizen that goes to work in Georgetown and have to walk in filth to get to the steps of their workplace, or a citizen that has to wait a million years for a land title document vote for such a political party to continue in power?