Who needs this embarrassment?

Aug 30, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

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By Adam Harris

One of the moist embarrassing things to happen to a traveller is to go to the airport, bid farewell to relatives and friends, even if temporarily and then get detained and even denied the opportunity to fly. One of my daughters suffered this ignominy just over a decade ago.
She was granted a scholarship to study in Venezuela where she spent three years from 1989. She returned home and the authorities could not even find a job for her so that she could serve her contract. It would have been interesting to see them insisting that she fulfill this contract today even though they could not place her.
She eventually gained employment after hustling around on her own, with the Guyana Agricultural and Industrial Development Bank. That bank closed post-1992 and she was posted to the Guyana National Cooperative Bank where there was no real position for her, forcing her to once again seek employment on her own. She ended up at Scotiabank.
In 1999 she decided on a vacation overseas, bought her airline ticket and ventured to the airport. She boarded the aircraft only to be removed because the government had a problem. She had not served her contract. The cold hard fact was that the government did not check its records and correct what needed to be corrected. She was able to travel the next day after procuring a letter from the Public Service Ministry. She had wasted money.
I was also the recipient of a government scholarship, way back in 1976. I had already completed a contract I had entered into in 1967. I had a minor problem travelling in 1988. The immigration officer decided to ask me whether I was still on a three-year contract. He surely could not count and the Public Service Ministry never took the time to have my name cleared.
There was an individual who had gone with me to Jamaica in 1976 and who was serving this country as First Secretary in the Guyana High Commission in London. Imagine the people at the Public Service Ministry decided to ask me about my colleague and whether he had honoured his contract, even while he was at the mission in London.
Obviously there is no correlation between the Public Service Ministry and its record-keeping. One signs a contract, gets one’s passport stamped indicating that one is beholden to the state, gets one’s name placed on a blacklist at the airport and there is no expiry date.
A young interventional cardiologist, Mahendra Carpen, suffered a most embarrassing episode. He is still pursuing studies in Canada. He graduated from President’s College in 1992, entered University of Guyana Medical School that same year as a PSM scholar, won major awards at graduation – a) Rolph Richards Prize in Clinical Medicine, b) Prime Minister’s Award for best graduate in Medical School, c) Vice Chancellor’s award for best graduate in Faculty of Medicine, then served four years of a five-year contract at the Georgetown Public Hospital.
He then re-signed a contract in 2003 for five years which incorporated the remainder of the first contract. He was therefore indebted to the government for four years.
He was sent on paid study leave to pursue Post Graduate training in Jamaica and graduated in 2007 from UWI Jamaica with Post -Graduate Internal Medicine. He then took unpaid study leave to pursue Fellowship training in Adult Cardiology at University of Toronto, to finish in 2011 with Fellowship in Interventional Cardiology. He had been recommended by the late Prof. Charles Denbow.
He came home on vacation in July and on departure, found that a notice had been posted in all the newspapers demanding that he report to the Public Service Ministry. He felt like a criminal. It mattered not that he had been returning regularly and was lecturing to doctors and medical students at the Georgetown Public Hospital, despite all of this being documented at the hospital.
“PSM put me on a watch list some time in 2008 and this prevented me from leaving Guyana after a visit in July 2009. I visited the Ministry of Health and got a new letter to travel the following day.
“Subsequently a notice seeking information was published in all three dailies on the 26th July. I have since contacted PSM, Ministry of Health and PHG. I was told that this was due to a miscommunication and that it would be resolved soon. It has been a month and no retraction,” Dr Carpen said to me recently
How can there be miscommunication? This miscommunication has been going on for almost four decades and the Public Service Ministry seems incapable of getting things right when it comes to its scholarship awardees.
No one has taken legal action and this is perhaps the reason why people continue to be embarrassed at the whims and fancies of PSM and the Guyana Government.
This is the age of computers. People no longer have to use ladders to climb and remove volumes from dusty shelves. Why can’t our services get things right?
Perhaps there is a need to prevent people from leaving Guyana and there is a policy of no holds barred. If that is the case then say so.

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