Guyana really changed for the worse

There was a time when Guyana was a garden of happy people. In fact, the world described us as the most hospitable people in the world. And indeed we were. We opened our doors to strangers. Those of us still around would remember that we walked the streets and asked for directions and people readily gave it. In the villages a stranger would enter and ask for somebody. If the elder felt that the direction was inadequate, he or she would call a young child and demand that the child take the stranger to the location he wanted to visit. All that has changed; we rarely talk to strangers except in the countryside and as for opening doors, we stay from our windows with the stranger at the gate and conduct whatever conversation there needs to be. We have become distrustful, largely because of the crime situation. And the crime is of recent vintage. It started when disrespect crept in and when the police were slow to act. Of course, people now always remind me that the police are products of the same society. I remember asking if the police would be involved in the crime spree too, and some asked me to stop smoking whatever I was, be it bizzy-bizzy or cow dung. I learnt of the robbery outside the Bourda Post Office and I was stunned. It was one of the largest in the history of the country. I remember a large one many, many years ago when the Prince brothers hit the Guyana Rice Board for some $98,000. That money would be worth about $200 million today. It was so much that they couldn’t spend it and they were caught. Years later when I became an adult and was visiting the Mazaruni Prisons, I met the last of the Prince Brothers. He was about to complete his twelve-year jail term. We talked about the crime and I remember saying that they made mistakes. Guns were not around in the numbers we have today and houses did not have grills and the kind of security that causes people to be trapped in their own homes in times of disasters. I remember Burnham revoking every gun licence in the wake of the violence in the early 1960s. That worked. Today we tend to share weapons like people sharing food in a soup kitchen. Just this past week, I learnt of a man getting shot in the back because he refused to submit to some home invaders who believed that they had the right to anything someone else earned. But there was something even more gruesome. There was a dismembered body on the Annandale foreshore. Whenever I read of such things I thought of the developed world where there are very sick people. There was Jeffrey Dahmer who killed people and ate them. Then there was the serial killer Wayne Williams. He killed twenty-seven black youths from 1979-1981 in Atlanta.  He was 23 years old when arrested in June 1981. In this recent case there was this woman who reportedly opted to come back home from the United States. Perhaps she talked about buying a car and therefore had about $2 million. So someone killed her and proceeded to cut every limb from her body. That wasn’t all; the person also beheaded her. In this beautiful country where did we go wrong? Just days earlier, someone had killed a fourteen-year-old girl on the Kitty foreshore. The child was left naked. Some say that the government must accept blame for such depraved behavior. They say that there has been less attention to people in recent times; that the leaders are more interested in getting rich beyond their wildest dreams. They get bountiful salaries but the people who are expected to protect the society are left to their own devices, often having to collect additional money at roadblocks. I couldn’t help notice the promises on the election campaign trail. The government did say that it is concerned that the leader of APNU+AFC has military connections. Then Cabinet Secretary Dr Roger Luncheon said that APNU in the National Assembly always supported increases for the joint services. He made it seem like a bad thing, but looking at what is happening in the society, one can only conclude that it made sense, because they are the people who can put a lid on this madness that is going on. The other day I had a look at the salary scales of the Ministers in the previous administration. In fact, there was never such a wide gap in salaries between the top and the bottom. The result was that corruption was not endemic. Today it is ubiquitous, and all this because everyone thinks that state funds are there for the taking. The opposition is talking about reducing certain things like tolls and increasing others like pensions and things like that. It is not surprising that the government is now offering to match those promises, but I must ask, “Why only now?”