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Give me plastic any time

Nov 16, 2008 My Column

A few days ago I happened to be among the media team to hear the police talk about the plans for Christmas. At the same time I learnt about the successes over the past year, but I also learnt some troubling things. For example, gun crimes are on the increase and increasingly, domestic violence is making a steady appearance in the news.
I can understand the increase in gun crimes because guns are as easy to get as a piece of cake. What I cannot understand is the inability of people to adjust so that they could minimize attacks.
Crime Chief Seelall Persaud said that it is easy to understand that a man walks into bank, withdraws a large sum of money and goes about his business. Sometimes he leaves the money in his car and enterprising people enter the car and help themselves to a payday. But there are others who insist on conducting cash transactions. These are the people who suffer at the point of the gun.
At work the other day a colleague of mine, commenting on the incidence of robberies at gunpoint, said that there was this foreigner who came to Guyana and remarked that Guyanese must be the most stupid people. He said that each day he reads that people are being robbed at gunpoint and he still cannot understand why people insist on going to that place called gunpoint, knowing that they are going to get robbed.
Years ago, I learnt that there is such a thing as a manager’s cheque which is as good as gold. If a man wants to buy a car for three million dollars he simply has to go to the bank and collect a manager’s cheque for that amount. But people refuse to do that and suffer.
The cold hard fact is that if the manager’s cheque is stolen it is useless to whoever steals it and the money is safe.
I am left to wonder whether banks do not readily offer the service. There are employees in banks who insist that people do not use cellular phones in the banks for fear that the user may be passing on information to a criminal outside.
But the corollary is that some bank employees may be doing the very thing. How else can one explain a man leaving a bank and being followed by men either on motorcycles or in another car and robbed?
A long time ago I wondered at the absence of plastic money in the society. A group of businessmen with members of the banking institution recently met, and they opted to look at this issue again. It may be years in coming, although I see no reason why plastic cannot come sooner.
Government is moving to pass legislation to accommodate this sort of transaction, right down to the point of enabling the very entities to access what is called a credit bureau in some countries.
I have traveled a bit and unless someone is into something illegal, most people do not have more than a few dollars in their wallets. This is the reason that in the developed world there are scarcely any robberies of persons. The criminal knows that he would be wasting his time.
I can still recall the man who claimed that two gunmen held him up (yes, at gunpoint) while he was a passenger in a minibus and made off with his money. He cried. He said that he works hard for whatever he has and the loss certainly meant something to him.
GuySuCo got hit for $17 million and largely by luck it managed to recover every cent.
Entities should pay people by cheque. All they have to do is to deposit a sum of money into a bank and the onus is on the employee to encash the cheque. All the talk about cash spending being something cultural is nonsense, because gunpoint robbery is also cultural in Guyana.
People who want to avoid the taxman would use the excuse that everyone does not have a bank account. They all should. The Ministry of Education went down that road and today no teacher is complaining. Certainly, none is getting robbed at gunpoint on payday.
I know that there are business houses that would always prefer cash because they get to avoid the income tax man, but they lose so much more in the long run that it would have been better for them to pay taxes.
Some of them, if they know the customer, would accept personal cheques, and it is believed that a mere thirty per cent of the transactions involve cheques. Those entities that have cheques invariably get back their money after a robbery.
The Crime Chief is correct. People encourage the robberies and as Christmas approaches it is going to get even worse unless people protect themselves. As a reporter I will get news but as a citizen I am going to be sorry for the victims.

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