Latest update April 25th, 2024 12:59 AM
Jan 23, 2017 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon
I have been doing columns since 1988. I have been a major columnist with the Catholic Standard, Stabroek News, Kaieteur News and was contracted by then Chronicle editor, Anthony Calder to serialize my investigations of the Buxton conspiracy between 2002-2005. In that long period, I have highlighted how immobilized and non-functional has been the administration of Guyana. In those columns, I would show how a priceless service to the people of Guyana would be absent or haphazard or non-existent. Ten years after, I would revisit the same occurrence because there was no change.
I drive in this country every day and I see lovely young people. I would watch them. I would stare at them. I would contemplate their future. I would feel sorry for them. Beautiful young men and women who do not deserve the mistreatment they will receive in their own country as they settle down in marriage and raise a family. I taught thousands of them at UG, a majority of who were wise enough to leave. The World Bank puts it at 82 percent the people with tertiary education who migrate.
What I am about to describe for you simply does not exist in the real world. But it does only in Guyana. I am putting my integrity and academic training on the line here when I say I believe, deep down in my heart, that no other country in this world behaves like this, or is so dysfunctional. I haven’t been to Sierra Leone of Rwanda, two countries that had horrible civil wars, but they have recovered and I feel the delivery of service is far more shapely and meaningful in those two nations than what we have in Guyana.
Here now is the description of what I saw, and what I endured on the afternoon of Monday, January 16, 2017. My wife and I came home in 1984. Since then, I am the one who goes to City Hall and pays the rates and taxes. I have been doing so since 1985. There hasn’t been one year where the service had changed or improved since 1985. I remind you to focus on the number 31, because I have been paying rates and taxes for 31 consecutive years at City Hall and the disastrous and painful service has been morbid each year, without exception.
I arrived at City Hall that afternoon, joined the line to pay my rates and taxes. The line was as slow as any other year the past 31 years. Something was not right and I knew what it was. The guy sitting next to me was complaining bitterly of the unmoving line. I said to him I saw this identical atrocity 31 years ago. Here is the problem. There is no inquiry desk. There is no help desk. The person that takes your inquiry is the person who is also the cashier.
What happens then is that the line is exasperatingly demobilized because the cashier is checking into the complaints and inquiries of home owners. Imagine if you got three properties whose papers are not in order, and that cashier is tending to you. The line will never move. That is what happened to me on January 16. All I wanted to do was to give my money to the teller without asking any question and I was gone.
When it was my turn, I paid the cashier for my home, my mother-in-law’s and another person. Each transaction took two minutes. That cashier was finished with me about seven minutes after I went up to her. I then told her; “madam you see how smooth life can be when you have systems in place. Such systems have never been in place in Guyana and I am cynical enough to say it will never be. I had to wait an inordinate time in a line to effect three transactions that took seven minutes to do.
I went to the bank with my wife and daughter to get our ATM cards renewed. It took us one hour because we had to go through the entire process as when we first had them; this included filling up a number of papers. I said to the teller, “But madam you have our personal details in your data base, why go through the paper work again.” She said, “Sir that is the procedure.” So what is the meaning of the concept of a data-base? I would like to think you are allowed in another country with your visa because they have you in their data base. You catch convicts because on a data base of finger prints. But this is Guyana!
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