The sight, sound and smell of politics on Saturday morning

OCTOBER 5, 2015 | BY KNEWS | FILED UNDER FEATURES / COLUMNISTS, FREDDIE KISSOON

For three days a week the City Council allows an alfesco market on Meriman’s Mall between Orange Walk and Cummings Street. I have been buying ground provisions and fruits from a particular Indian family for years now. I would buy my stuff, have a little chat with the mother and her son, and move on. For all the years that they have known me and know about my public political activism, they have never uttered a word about the government to me. All that changed Saturday last. The son said to me, “Mr. Kissoon why are things so bad in the country?” I was livid. I know where he was coming from. For all the years I patronized this family, they never uttered even one word about what was happening in the country under the PPP. So I said to him; “Did you have a padlock on your mouth all these years and now you have taken it off?” He gave off a huge smile and his mother was laughing broadly. They knew what I was getting at. I asked if they didn’t see anything to complain about all the years that have gone by. I left telling him he was too young to judge people by their name, race and texture of hair. On my way out, I stopped at the “papaw lady.” I have been buying papaw from her as long as I have been a customer of the provisions vendor. An Indian man in his mid-seventies was talking to two young Indian women, both of whom look like they were in their late twenties. He was talking in decibels that made him audible to others. He told the two women that Guyana is heading for disaster, the sugar industry has collapsed, that even the new government had admitted that the economy is in trouble. He was just emotionally charged up against the Granger Government. He saw me, knew I was listening and all three left immediately The uncontrollable compunction was there to beckon to all three and ask them how they could be so shameless. If the sugar industry has collapsed it could not have fallen in the four months that the APNU-AFC Government has been in power. I spoke to the papaw lady and asked her how she could believe that the country has become so bad within four months of the new government. With a jejune expression accompanied with an almost invisible, intestinal smile, she uttered, “Yes, de country gaan baad.” What a sad day for this country. Guyanese Indians only want Indians to be in power, no matter how decent an African Guyanese is. I knew where all those persons I spoke to and listen to on the Merriman’s Mall last Saturday were coming from. They are Indians that do not support the new Government because it is not an Indian regime. But when all is said and done, you can forgive them. These are ordinary folks without a higher education. The elderly man and his two listeners were just ordinary people without years of educational learning. What do you think about those who attended the meeting with Bharrat Jagdeo in New York last week? What is the difference between the folks I met on the M.erriman’s Mall and the people in the room in New York that listened to the failed presidency of Mr. Jagdeo? The difference is education. This is where the tragedy of the human being lies. I doubt whether the papaw lady and the family of the ground provisions vendor ever saw a college door. I doubt if they know what the words “sociology” and “governance mean. These are poor people selling fruits and vegetables to make a living The people who Jagdeo addressed are lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers, real estate agents, investors, accountants etc. But they think like the people I met last Saturday. Their university education went out the window and they put on their ethnic make-up when they walked into that room to listen to a man who has been the de jure president for twelve years and the de facto president for three years. In those fifteen years, the sugar industry collapsed, the rice industry fell on hard times, UG became moribund, NIS sailed into muddy waters, infrastructure deteriorated, the Georgetown Hospital remained a hell hole, Georgetown became fetid, drug men took over the country and we were still being mistreated by islands in the Caribbean smaller than Wakenam,Leguan and Hogg Island. A writer once said the mind is a dangerous thing. The racist mind is even more dangerous.