Guyana Observer News

Moral symbolisms and unintelligent government

Sunday, 07 February 2010

By Freddie Kissoon

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I began this piece on Friday evening as soon as I came from work; the Sunday columns have to be in at Kaieteur early Saturday morning. In keeping with my promise to myself as outlined in my Friday article, I plan to pursue the topics that I put in my work schedule over the weeks and months. So I came home Friday night and began to analyse the speech President Jagdeo gave at Ogle airport last year to mark the certification of the airport to conduct regional flights. It was an important political presentation by Mr. Jagdeo for the fundamental reason in that like so many elegant deliverances in the past by his predecessors, the delivery failed to recognize the missing link to Guyana’s future.

I got up early Saturday morning, hosed my flower garden with GWI water that former GWI strongman, Karan Singh (is he to be charged?) demanded we must not use except for cooking and washing, had my cereal (no, I didn’t have coffee yesterday), picked up the papers to read then complete my assessment on the Ogle speech. This was not to be. What I wrote in Friday’s column rang out loudly in my ears. You cannot execute your work schedule because this miserably incompetent Government keeps creating bad news after bad news after bad news. What you set out to write on becomes lost in the vortex of new stupidities.
So both independent dailies carried the news in their Saturday editions that the Government will be constructing an office to house state intelligence operations to be located in the compound of Castellani House. If the PPP wins the next general election, this country will not survive. It cannot survive such massive outpouring of unintelligent government. It is not that we have to endure incompetent administration of the country’s affairs, but it is the sickening level of unintelligent thinking that characterizes governance in Guyana. Castellani House sits in the Botanic Gardens. The entire area is of aesthetic ambience. The House holds the national art gallery. This country, by comparative stands in these parts of the world, is large with unoccupied state lands being bountiful (to use a Rasta term).
Why put a state security building right in the middle of an aesthetic ambience? The security arrangement will devastate the free passage to the art gallery. All kinds of searches visitors will have to endure. We are talking about the politics of asininity here, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone who has lived under this effete regime the past seventeen years. For example, I know a few years ago, the policy was that to buy the official gazette you had to procure it from the Office of the President. Which fool made that policy?
So to get a simple copy of the gazette, you go to New Garden Street, state your name, have your bag searched, have your body scanned by the mobile metal detector and receive a visitor’s tag. All of this just to buy the gazette. Can you find such stupidity anywhere else in the world? Do you mean to say that there isn’t a place in large Guyana (whose territory combined the entire Caricom membership) that this unintelligent Government can find to locate that security office but in the compound of Castellani House, a place open to constant visitors including foreigners?
A good place to start looking for examples of unintelligent use of power is in the area of moral obligations. Most, if not all governments have stamped on the nation’s fabric the role of moral symbolisms. These moral motifs reinforce respect for the flag, the anthem, the government, but most of all the spirit and soul of the country. Mr. Khurshid Sattaur was upset when I wrote that it sends the wrong moral signal that legally he is not required to pay taxes. The commentary was not directed to Sattaur personally but to the rulers that made that policy. It is an insult to moral symbolisms when the chief tax collector is exempt from paying taxes.
A simple, most simple arrangement was to add on to the salary of Mr. Sattaur the amount that had to be deducted for PAYE. What moral respect can citizens have for their government when they are taken to court for tax default and the person making that punishment doesn’t pay taxes. The fault doesn’t lie with Sattaur but with the unintelligent rulers we have here some of whom, like Sarah Palin didn’t know that Africa is a continent not a country and that Paris is not a country but a city in a country. Why not put a public urinal next to the Cenotaph?

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