Guyana Observer News

One of the most horrible moments of my life

Monday, 27 July 2009

Is Guyana a failed state? I believe it is. Mr. Jagdeo’s business-friends who are putting up tall buildings, would say no. One would like to think that these business people have a more than passing familiarity with political theory. When scholars describe a state as a failed country, they certainly do not use one criterion only – the nature of the economy. We’ll get back to that subject below. Somalia is listed as a failed state but I would truly like to know if in the capital, Mogadishu, right in the heart of the city, when citizens flush their toilets, the feces back up and flow over onto the floor of their houses?

This happens in Guyana. On Friday, a citizen called me to show me what was taking place in her home. It was one of the most horrible moments of my life as a human rights activist. She lives downstairs. There are tenants who occupy the upper flat.

Because only 3 of the 28 sewage pumps in the city are working, it means there is a complete back-up of feces in Georgetown. What this woman showed me has convinced me that Guyana is a failed state and we, as a population, as a nation, have to take a stand now for the sake of our children and their children to come.

What I saw in that lady’s house is a horror story that never occurred under the rule of the PNC from 1964 until that party went out of power on 1992.

When the tenants upstairs flush their toilets, the feces come down in her bowl and runs over. This is a scientific reality because the upstairs stuff has no way to go because the pipes are clogged. The look on this woman’s face tells the story of a failed country.

What was heartbreaking is that she then solemnly intoned; “Mr. Kissoon I have a guest from Trinidad.” It was one of the saddest experiences in my political life.

Nothing like this I saw when in the 1980s, Mr. Burnham’s administration had no money to run the country. Science follows logical paths. Science produces laws. It is predictable then that the same disaster is occurring in lower flats all over Georgetown.

Back to our business friends and the theory of the failed state. Some of the supporters of the Government who are the recipients of cheap divestments of the resources, lands and properties of the people of Guyana by the Jagdeo Government, would reject the concept of a collapsed nation.

They would say that they are putting confidence in Guyana by investing. For them, Guyana has not disappeared because they are putting money in the economy. This is not the criterion by which you judge the existence of a decayed polity. Sierra Leone was replete with huge buildings jutting into the skyline. Investors were putting money into the economy.

But it still crashed into a failed state situation because politics had broken down. The country was not being administered. The ruling regime couldn’t hold the territory together.

This is what we have in Guyana today. The social superstructure and the physical infrastructure have broken down. According to our eminent scholar, Dr. Clive Thomas, a criminalized state has emerged in Guyana. My research into the politics of authoritarian power reveals that in Guyana there is the degeneracy where decision-makers are cocooned in a labyrinthine, Sicilian and Byzantine network with dubious income-earners in which narco-trafficking is an open secret.

These are the characteristics of a failed state. The Government in Guyana is not in control of the totality of administrative functionalism. Guyana has broken down. Here is another example. I am looking at my water bill that GWI sent me on Friday. The reading is from April 1 to May 20, 2009.

Payment required is $18, 316. Now you can see that is for one month. A household has to use gargantuan amount of water to pay $3000 for one month. I have to pay $18, 000. If I scrub a hundred dinosaurs each day, changing the swimming pool water every minute and leave the pipe running the entire day, it still would not be $18, 000 a month.

The previous Water Minister has a Masters’ Degree in Management. Look at how small is our population and GWI cannot get it right after seventeen years of PPP rule. GT&T has more subscribers than the metered customers of GWI. Things fell apart. Then everything crashed. The feces have overrun Georgetown. Guyana is a failed state. Can the Phoenix rise from the ashes? Can we bring it back? Yes, we can!

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