Too much people sailing

I DON’T have the time to visit my Facebook page daily or hourly, but I do in a timely manner and I recently came upon a discussion about mini buses and someone suggested big buses, but there was one contributor that caught my attention. This person was saying that there used to be big buses until the PNC banned them. Another replied ‘I didn’t know that.’ I contributed with an explanation, as I worked at one point at GRB not far from Motor Transport-Yellow Buses, before they went out of business, during the period when the oil crisis hit all the countries that were not oil producers and Guyana reeled under that impact. I doubt that there was any politics involved.

I do realise that there is a big information void about most of our history from 1900 to the present. But this is post-Independence history and it was never taught in any primary or secondary school text that my children brought home, so most of our young population can be lied to and told foolishness, because there is not enough information available on the period from 1940 to 2000 to force our would-be politicians especially those in the opposition to be ‘honest’ in their rhetoric.

I arrested the statement and called a colleague- yes there are persons with the historical memory who can be engaged to provide adequate data. I related a jolted timeline in that conversation and Ronald filled in the missing pieces. We went back to the closing out in the late 60s of our railway service; it was to prove an error of judgement when the service was cancelled. By 1970, the PNC government had constructed and began construction of the Georgetown to Linden and Georgetown to Rosignol highways; Mandela, the Corentyne and West Bank- Coast highways, among others.

With the absence of the railway, the big buses were imported, TATA buses (these buses were not as sturdy as anticipated) in Georgetown the TATA ran the routes of the newly created Festival City and South Ruimveldt scheme wards. While the Motor Transport –Yellow Buses that were privately owned continued their central Georgetown and East & West Ruimveldt, Front and Back Road routes, until the shadow of the oil crisis.

Guyana’s woes in 1973 began when the Arab dominated Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting countries OPEC began an embargo against the western countries that supported Israel and Israel’s assault on the Palestinians. By the end of the embargo (that saw Israel at war with Egypt and Syria), the cost of oil had risen from $3 per barrel to $12.

This was followed by the 1979 oil crisis, which saw oil more than double its price with the price of crude oil at $ 39.50 per barrel. In 1974 from a New York Times article by Dave Binder titled ‘Oil Crisis Disrupts Caribbean Development Plans’- at that time Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana were the Caribbean region’s newborn economic community. But the current oil shortage and the accompanying spiral of fuel prices have damaged even Trinidad and Tobago the twin-island state that produces and refines her own oil.

Nowhere has the oil crisis more evident than in Guyana, contended Binder. Prime Minister Eric Williams is quoted as saying that he could not continue to offer special rates to his CARICOM partners because it was simply unworkable in a world oil market to have two-tier pricing. “There have been sharp increases in violent crimes in Trinidad, Jamaica and Guyana following these developments,” the narrative continued. “Guyana’s Minister of State at the time, Christopher A. Nascimento has attributed the rise in ’choke and Robb’ crimes to unemployment which he pointed to be at around 15 percent but it was assessed to be much higher.”

Those external developments had wiped out small manufacturing, clothing factories, canning, printer operations etc along with the private bus companies that could not survive the rising and absent access to petrol and went out of business followed by the loss of numerous jobs. Foreign dollars were scarce and importation was stifled. Those were the days when we stood in line for Kero, Gas and accustomed necessities.

Opposition politicians choose to misguide and peddle the propaganda that government stealing and spite had caused the domestic shortages and restrictions on importing certain items favourable to their constituency. Like the Facebook post, where do younger Guyanese with no historical memory of that period go to find out simple national facts like why we endured the shortages and the disappearance of the big buses? How would they know that it was President Hoyt years later who gave the permission to Eddy Grant to import the first minibuses? Nascimento, Jeffrey Thomas, Ronald Austin among others are still available, but the time clock waits for no human consensus.

It is time to enact the National Heritage Commission, to house a reservoir of relevant data that a clueless population can reach to when self-promoted people choose to lie to them. We must conclude that we humans come with all dispositions and ‘evil’ is also a human disposition that only truth can protect some who desire to know, from the ‘evil other human’.