Dear Editor,
Quelle supris! The President pushes ahead with casino gambling in Guyana! My heart aches for my beloved country.
With this government’s push for casino gambling, the President and his acolytes say that they are only interested in promoting tourism. Who’s buying that? The majority of visitors to Guyana are overseas-based Guyanese. They have not brought their friends home because of the lack of gambling facilities, but because the government has failed to provide security and basic amenities. They are being attacked in their homes when they visit, and outside their gates are mounds of trash; dirty child beggars; and bedraggled, mentally ill street people, (some with cutlass visibly displayed).
In the last month, the President has used the taxpayers’ money to bail out a private enterprise that is slated to benefit from the very casino gambling that the taxpayers do not want introduced into the society. He has been defensive when questioned on his decision, displaying a blatant disregard for the citizens’ money and wishes. I had to cast my mind back thirty years to Burnham riding his horse like a “massa” and goading (some say kicking) his senior civil servants as they wasted the taxpayers’ money cutting grass on the parapets of Georgetown, to find a parallel act of arrogance.
Daily the Guyanese citizenry has spoken out against this ploy to attract tourists to our beloved country. It is disingenuous of this government to ridicule the concerns of the religious community when it is their opinion the President sought at the beginning of this debacle. Our government officials know very well that it is not only on moral grounds that Guyanese object to casino gambling in our midst, and there is nothing that they have said or done that erases our concerns. The last time I checked this was a democratic and not a paternalistic society. An honest, democratically chosen government is mandated to serve all the people. In our midst silently lurk the criminally-minded awaiting opportunity, the bored rich, the immoral, and the well connected. Casino gambling in a fractured society, what a gift!
If the government wants to promote Guyana as a preferred tourist destination, it can start by aggressively promoting the stunning, natural, unspoiled beauty of our country, to the billion dollar eco-tourism industry; guarantee its citizens and visitors a safe and secure environment; provide a good transportation system; insist on professional and courteous service (beginning with its civil servants); provide reliable water, electricity supply, and clean environs. Casino gambling will lock the tourists behind doors benefiting few with their foreign currency. The thousands of “regular” folk the government insists this venture will provide work for will be outside with their faces “pressed up against the windowpane!”
This fiasco is typical third world politics where the winner takes all, and the wishes of the people be damned. That is, of course, until five years from now, just before the next elections, when the government starts handing out of housing lots, laying down roads, providing water and electricity, and revving up security by finds and destroys some local dispensable “bad johns.”
So what has changed in 40 years of self-governing, but the face and speed of our downward spiral? Burnham/ Jadgeo – “same, same, but different.”
Yours faithfully,
Cheryl E. Noel