Waiting in vain
Freddie Kissoon column
Kaieteur News
November 4, 2006
It must have gone through the thoughts of every citizen in this country how unbearable life would have been if our population was a million and over. Not only would life have been chaotic and harsh, but probably impossible. One must always remember when one is writing about Guyana that even though we are 183, 000 square miles, the territory is vastly underdeveloped, so that the actual square miles of modern occupation are very narrow, making us one of the smallest countries in the world.
To this we must add the simple network of roads we have. We are small in population and small in land space, and our highways and network of roads are also uncomplicated. For example, there is one road that leads from Georgetown to Rosignol. There is one road that leads from New Amsterdam to Moleson Creek, where the ferry takes you to Suriname. There is one route that connects Georgetown to the airport.
Yet, in such a country (that I have just described), it literally takes months and years to get life's simplest tasks done. You know, people meet me all the time and tell me how much I have exposed the collapse of Guyana's only university, and I would tell them that my writings on UG are not even a quarter of the picture. One of the universities I have been to had 28, 000 students. At that institution, a student can get his or her records in minutes. A student's complaint or a lecturer's application for promotion takes literally days.
At UG, a student has to wait for almost a year to get the results of an appealed grade. If a hole in a lecturer's room is sending down water, they will come about a month after the complaint is made to plug it. UG has 5000 students and about 600 staff members. Just throw in a few thousand more students there, and the waiting would take years. But here is some shocking information that will numb your mind.
In 2004, two Canadian professors did a study of the human resource needs of UG. entitled, “An Assessment of the Use of Human Resources at the University of Guyana.” The authors made the following comment on page 5: “As the data provided by the Personnel Department showed, each personnel staff member is providing service to 28 employees (of UG), a ratio of 1.28 on average. This is by far a substantially higher ratio compared with standards in other parts of the world.” This is frightening information that shows the tragedy that has befallen this country. The authors are telling us that UG has a higher standard than most countries when it comes to the staff ratio in the Personnel Section serving the needs of the employees. Yet this is a university where the waiting to be served is appallingly endless.
It is one of the world's mysteries why a country like Guyana, with a limited number of people living here, takes so long to get things done. There are 700, 000 souls here. Use your imagination and envisage what would have happened to this country if there were two million. Civilisation would not have survived.
I remember when Navin Chandarpaul was Minister of Agriculture he publicly castigated the commercial banks for the slow pace at rescheduling the loans of rice farmers, who had defaulted in their repayments due to a crash in the world price for rice. I read that man's words in the press, and I thought it was one of the most hypocritical statements ever made by a minister of government. Among the governments of the world, most rate our government here in Guyana as one of the slowest when doing its work.
GPL, GWI and GT&T seldom show any mercy to the countless people they hurt in this country due to the delay process that characterise their work attitude. Like I wrote in my column yesterday, they get away with these grievous violations because Guyana has lost its spirit of protest. My brother Harold “Lightweight” Kissoon died on Monday. During the activities in planning his funeral, his son told me that he was near breaking point. He complained bitterly to me what GPL did to him.
His story was that they came and made a disconnection on the claim of $8000 owing. There were arguments on both sides until GPL's computer data showed that a mistake was made. An apology was tendered, but GPL came two days after to restore his electricity. What is morally sickening about this incident is that there are literally thousands of cases similar to my nephew's. Electricity is not an amenity, it is one of modern civilisation's necessities. Without electricity the great American nation would collapse.
Now, GPL came, took off the lights, then found out that it acted wrongly. Surely, there was a strong moral obligation to effect the reconnection immediately, since the consumer was wronged unreasonably. GPL gets away with this autocratic cruelty because there is no properly functioning judicial system in this country. This is one of the cancers that are eating away at the fabric of this nation. We will never be a free, modern, civilised society unless we have a judicial system that can award justice in a timely fashion.
I have always argued that the day the judicial system awards a mammoth judgement against controversial companies like BWIA, GWI, GT&T and GPL, the level of complaints will cease. These entities know that they will not be sued, or if they are sued, the plaintiff will die before the case reaches the judge, so they remain hardened and insensitive in their attitudes to those they have hurt. In Europe and North America, utilities have had countless lawsuits go against them, so they are careful about their lapses. Here, in Guyana, slavery continues. But I guess there is always the exit door for most Guyanese – emigration.