Guyanese had better start learning to fix their broken limbs

Aug 26, 2011 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The University of Guyana is considering scrapping the Optometry, Rehabilitation and Pharmacy programs. In this eye for an eye country where people are losing their eyes every day with this failed justice system and the crime-infested paradise the PPP created, they are scrapping the Optometry program. Every year hundreds of Guyanese people line up for clinics held by foreign doctors to have cataracts removed yet this government doesn’t see it fit to keep an Optometry program running at UG. The population of this country is ageing at a faster rate than it is producing babies yet the visionaries like Ramotar and Jagdeo decide it is best to scrap Optometry, Rehabilitation and Pharmacy. Don’t ageing populations use more medicines? After the giveaway of the Guyana Pharmaceutical Corporation, they want to stop producing pharmacists.
With all of these vehicles on the road getting mashed up every day due to the Wild West frontier town that inhabits our roadways, you definitely won’t need a rehabilitation program to fix people up after they are broken up from all manner of accidents. In a world increasingly dominated by technology and fixated on the pursuit of scientific and technological development, the misguided misleaders of this nation allowed these University of Guyana programs to rot and are now considering scrapping them. Instead of writing those delusions of grandeur and propaganda to the newspapers, Prem Misir should focus on getting the same government he so blindly supports to actually spend some money on the cesspool he oversees at UG.
So what is the endgame here? With all this infrastructure building the PPP boasts about all over Guyana, is the PPP telling me it can’t find a few contractors with connections to give them the contract to prepare the facilities for these programs to continue. I mean this is a wonderful opportunity for some connected individuals in with the right crowd to get a juicy $300 million contract to provide some substandard equipment. Are these guys losing their touch? Is the plan to hire and pay foreign rehab specialists, optometrists and pharmacists or will those who just paid 16 percent VAT and a mountain of taxes simply have to do without these services? Do we have to fix our own legs when we fall down a pothole left on a road built just six months before? It seems like the consideration to scrap the Optometry program is to make more people blind to the madness these people are unleashing on the lives on the citizens of this country. Maybe the UG Pharmacy program was denying the other set of pharmacists running the show in Guyana.
Do you know what will really happen here? When these programs are gone and the number of optometrists, rehabilitation specialists and pharmacists are falling, it will be only the rich that can afford these services. The few specialists left in the country will leave their government jobs and set up their own practices. Then it is only those select few who get those nice contracts wrapped with a bow that will afford these services. Guyanese had better start learning to fix their broken limbs and to learn to mix drugs (legal that is) and start learning how to make spectacles.
This is the true tragedy of a country gone to hell in a handbasket. Yet there are some of the poor and the powerless in this country who want their children to attend this same and only University of Guyana but who will see nothing wrong in voting for these political frauds again. That is the true tragedy. They will prefer to vote for a party that will provide their children a university of inadequate equipment and facilities and a university that scraps science programs. They will vote for the miseducation of their own children. Until and unless these people wake up there will be no program left and no university standing. The dream of Cheddi Jagan when he started the University of Guyana has vanished under the ridiculousness of Jagdeo and his consultant, General Secretary Donald Ramotar. These men are continuing the devastation of the PNC. And they want students to pay for it. Ask yourself this: what’s the point of paying for all those extra lessons and breaking your bank book buying all those books for your children to become doctors and lawyers and this and that when the ultimate place for them to get that education is scrapping programs because it doesn’t have equipment? The PPP does not care to have educated youths in this nation for education poses a threat to the kind of men who suspend congresses to avoid hearing voices of dissent from their own members and supporters.
M. Maxwell

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