Guyana Tourism = 3 jamaicans + 1 dead jackass
May 5th, 2008 | by rebelucion | filed in Guyana Cocaine | organise, mobilise, resist, protest!
Kaieteur News, Sun 4th May 2008
Three Jamaicans and a rotting donkey
Over the years, the Ministry of Tourism and the tourism people have bemoaned the constant appearance of crime stories in the daily newspapers. Now President Jagdeo has gotten into the act of lamenting gory images on the front pages of our newspapers. There are two reasons for this frustration: one from the tourist authorities, the other from the government itself. We will leave out any discussion of the motive of the ruling elites’ annoyance. In their case, they feel that is not doing the image of the country any good. They never seem to realize that the biggest enemy of the government may be the government itself with the unpopular policies they enact.
Let’s deal with the tourism people. There has been an enduring opportunism on the part of tourism officials in this country that borders on dishonesty. The tourism planners only seem to pinpoint crime reporting as the main deterrent for people coming to Guyana. The research will not bear this out. And these people know that. What is troubling to know is that Guyana’s tourist industry will not expand into viability if the promoters behave like the ostrich in the sand.Maybe it is more than the ostrich syndrome. Maybe it is both fear and opportunism; opportunism in the sense that the tourist sector feels that it is safe to remain cautious and not criticize the government for behaviour that makes Guyana appear like a failed state.
Since the government has to dispense concession to the industry, it would not be wise to call a spade a spade. Fear in the sense that the tourism officials are intimidated by the government and it is afraid to tell the political controllers of state power that they continue to damage the image of Guyana in the international community by the shameless way they govern the country.
My contestation is that crime reporting is not a deciding factor in keeping people away. People’s choice for visiting a country lies in their aesthetic instinct. They want to go to a land and enjoy its modernity and its development. If these values are missing from the horizon, they will not come.The tourism investors must understand that we live in a global village. There is little you can hide from people who have an interest in traveling to the Caribbean. In the Caribbean context, this country is seen by its neighbours as an underdeveloped banana republic. And maybe that is what we are because we behave like the underlings of the oligarchs in a banana republic.
News spreads fast around the world, especially on the internet. Let us connect the two themes of modernity and development. When we hosted World Cup Cricket, there was no hair-raising criminal enterprise. No gruesome images appeared in the media. Yet many English, South African, Caribbean and New Zealand fans chose not to come to Guyana to watch their players.
The study of the attendance at CWC 2007 revealed that a majority of visitors were Guyanese who live in other countries.Why didn’t the fans come but instead visited of all places, Jamaica, one of the crime capitals of the world? One has to understand that crime is “no big thing” to the average European and American. They have high incidences of crime in their countries. It is like homosexuality. They just accept it as part of their country’s landscape. But these very people come from highly developed territories and they want to visit places where their rented cars do not get stuck in a huge hole on one of the main streets in the capital city. They want to use a washroom of a ferry that is clean and won’t give them infection. They want to be treated politely by a traffic rank when they inadvertently go the wrong way on a one-way track.
Tourists look for these things in a country. They expect these things from any nation in 2008. Even if there is crime, they will come because crime does not bother them. They are accustomed to it in Mexico where foreigners get robbed all the time. In Guyana, we are millions of miles away from attracting the citizens of the world to this land.The visitors to this territory are appalled at the toilet facilities on the TH&D ferries. They are shocked at the lack of basic amenities in Guyana. Tourists will not come for the third time when after a visit to the East Bank, they take Lombard Street to get to Georgetown and their car falls into a huge crater on Hadfield Street at the junction with Lombard Street. Five years later they come again and the crater is still there. They are not coming back for a third time.Three Jamaican visitors who came for CWC 2007 didn’t know parking was prohibited outside Celina Atlantic Resort. Policemen with big guns pounced on them, kept them for almost a day at Brickdam and made them feel like criminals. They told the press they aren’t coming back.
A few months back, Caricom had a high-level three-day meeting. On the main highway leading to the Secretariat, a donkey died and rotted for almost a week. Those delegates had to see this unspeakable abomination for three days. Yesterday, there was another dead donkey, this time outside a fast food outlet on Vlissengen Road. The dead animal had been there for three days.
It is time our tourism officials see Guyana as it is. If they care about their industry, then they must be honest in their thoughts. In the meantime, our newspapers have an obligation to the people of this country. Guyanese must be informed about crime. If gruesome killings are taking place, the Guyanese people have a right to be informed.It would be nice if Guyana was a nice place to report on the nice things happening here.
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we're tryin to locate fotos of this two.bit cocaine hustler and former house thief. the only ones we have is this one, the one of him sittin in his vest in suriname and that famous black and white mug shot one.
