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A most despicable attitude

Nov 04, 2010 Editorial

Last week both the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security and the Ministry of Education took disciplinary action against those members of staff who it would appear, did not accept their responsibility to protect a young girl who had been presented to them for help.
Two of the staff of the Human Services Ministry were accused of neglecting their duties and for this they were summarily dismissed. At Queen’s College, the school that the girl attended, five people including the head mistress and the deputy head mistress were visited with sanctions that would either see them demoted or being denied promotion.
These actions came after the girl was killed and her story splashed across the pages of the newspapers. Subsequent investigations by the media showed that she had been neglected by the people and organizations that were supposed to protect her.
The actions by the authorities would suggest that this is a new phenomenon, that in the case of the two entities the lack of action by the people who have now been disciplined is an aberration. The truth is that those now being punished merely reflect what has become endemic in the society.
It has become almost endemic that people perform the basic minimum to maintain their employment and to earn their pay. It is not unusual for a person seeking help or information in a government office to be shunted from one person to another. It is also not unusual to hear people saying that whatever is requested is not their job.
We now know that some teachers at Queen’s College went beyond their duty to take Neesa Gopaul to the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security. There someone should have dealt expeditiously with the matter at hand. Instead, there seemed to have been a lot of foot-dragging to the point that Minister Priya Manickchand was forced to acknowledge that her Ministry failed the girl.
We have cases of people seeking legal help and going to the registry of the courts. Rather than people rushing to assist those coming off the streets, many would simply sit and stare at the person seeking help.
We have had to intervene on many cases simply by calling the officer in charge and spurring him or her to deal with the recalcitrant staff. Needless to say, there is anger as though the unwilling staff member’s right is being violated.
Even at the Georgetown Public Hospital we find this same reluctance to work. In recent times, there have been numerous reports of patients complaining about the action of the nurses. A young woman, giving birth to her first baby, spoke of nurses leaving her in the delivery room because their shift had ended.
This is most unusual because one would expect nurses to be helpful at all times. Many were known to leave their homes at all hours to cater to the sick. To compound the issue, some are mothers in their own right and they would have experienced the travails of childbirth.
Still fresh in the memory of people is the action of the nurses in the United States after terrorists delivered a deadly attack that leveled the World trade Centre and a section of the Pentagon. Nurses were either off duty or on leave. They donned their uniforms and left their home to provide whatever service they could.
One could only conclude that many of them in Guyana would have ignored the crisis because, as they would have put it, it was not their time to work.
We have seen teachers ignoring a class that has no teacher at the time and the list goes on. There are policemen who ignore certain indiscretions because they are either off duty or because the task does not fall to them. For example, regular policemen are loath to arrest traffic offenders.
We need a return to what was in the days when we worked for much less but took pride in what we did.

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