Guyana Observer News

Freddie Kissoon

Next Sunday in Berbice, in Port Mourant, PPP leaders will gather to observe the death anniversary of Cheddi Jagan. Sugar workers, fishermen, housewives and many others from the working class of Berbice will be there. Missing from the rally will be intellectuals with an objective mind to analyse who really this man was and what he has contributed to East Indians.

Dale Andrews (of this newspaper) and I were taking victims of a Canadian immigration controversy to the police at Eve Leary. After we were finished, the father of a daughter, who didn’t make it to Canada, wanted a ride to the car park. I took him in the car and Dale and I began to chat with him. He had mortgaged his home so that his daughter could go to a Canadian college. I truly felt deeply sympathetic for this middle-aged man. He wore a low cost pair of running shoes with a slightly faded pair of trousers and a worn-out cream shirt. He appeared to me to be a hard working labourer of the small farming type. His documents were in a huge corrugated, brown envelope that was torn open at the seams.

I have a daughter and I know how much she means to me. I could understand how hurt he felt that his girl-child didn’t get her visa. I bluntly asked him who he voted for. He told me the PPP. I then loudly questioned why he didn’t send his child to UG.

For all his simplicity and humble background he was sensible to know that UG was not up scratch. He quietly intoned that he wanted her to get a good education. This simple farmer knew UG wasn’t good enough for his child. So I fired back and asked why then did he vote for the PPP that couldn’t develop UG and led him to lose his house just to get his daughter to Canada. With a small voice, he told us; “Never again.”

I buy my plant pots at this guy in Ogle. Last Tuesday, after he put the pots in my car trunk, he related to me how his daughter was treated at the Ministry of Agriculture. She was fired because the PPP big boys suspected that she was sympathetic to some of her colleagues who were on go-slow action to protest some issue at one of the agricultural organizations although she was not involved in the industrial action.

He and his wife went and pleaded for his daughter’s employment. He told me that he couldn’t believe that the PPP leaders were so arrogant and heartless. I asked the question – who did you vote for in 2006. He told me the PPP but intoned that he wouldn’t do that again.

He said; “Freddie, I didn’t know they were like that.” If you need to verify these two incidents, talk to Dale Andrews on the first and look for the man whose plants pots are on display in front of his yard on the road soon after you pass the traffic lights going east on the Railway Embankment.
So what is the point? I once wrote on this page that Guyanese Indians are going to remain a psychically damaged ethnic community once they do not exorcize from their psychology their attachment to the PPP. Guyanese Indians can be found in humiliating circumstances all over the world.

They do all kinds of illegal and unacceptable things to leave these shores. They ran the Canadian consular officers out of this country. An American Embassy official told me the bogus papers would be so badly forged that even the blind can see them but these people would still tender them at the wicket.

The day the Guyanese Indians throw off that burden they carry, they will become a psychologically free people. The Indian dilemma borders on the incomprehensible. In 2006, they refused to let other parties run Guyana and as soon as they voted, they looked for a way of getting out.
The Guyanese Indians have a Freudian burden that has damaged their psyche. The catharsis can come once they recognize the PPP for what it is.

Indian intellectuals must add to the efforts of Baytoram Ramharack and Clement Seecharran and write books showing the failures of Jagan and how he betrayed his people and sacrificed them on the altar of ideology for his own selfish reason. The historical myths about Cheddi Jagan are slowly being shattered.
Berbicians do not have to look far to see the hypocrisy of the people Jagan left to rule them. Look at the payment demanded from them to use a cheap, cheap bridge. They must ask themselves if they would have accepted that from an African Government.