Shifting standards downward

Jul 21, 2011 Editorial

The reopening of the period of claims and objections is at best, a case of the government bending over backwards to allow eligible voters to become registered and having their names included on the National Register of Registrants or at worst, a case of pandering to the lazy and to the apathetic largely because of narrow political interests.
Three years ago the Guyana Elections Commission decided that unless someone had a birth certificate then that person could not be registered. Three years is a long time. If one’s passport were to expire within three years then one would not be too worried. But as the expiration date nears one would begin to put measures in place to have that document renewed. Given the rate at which people travel, a passport is seen as a very important document and people do not play.
It is the same with people who have visitors’ visas to foreign lands. More often than not people know the expiration date and they do not hesitate to have the document renewed. In both the case of the passport and the visitor’s visa source documents are required and people do not hesitate to procure them.
It is the same with people who seek to get married. They must provide birth certificates and once they are serious they pull out all the stops to acquire the document. At one time, there was never a day without people crowding the General Registrar’s Office for birth certificates. They all know the importance of the documents.
At a press conference, Head of the Presidential Secretariat, Dr Roger Luncheon, said that people who were born a long time would be hard pressed to have a birth certificate since the older document would not have withstood the ravages of time. Suffice it to say that people have always set store by some documents and they have always cared these.
Knowing these things, it is rather strange that people would actually take three years to source birth certificates to register for the elections. It must be that people do not care about national elections. At the end of the three years the political parties on the campaign trail must have found out that many persons failed to register.
This did not mean that all these people who failed to get registered did not have the birth document. It must have been that the political parties, keen to get every single vote available, pressured these people to get registered. This is pandering to slackness and apathy.
By pandering to this slackness the state has saddled the taxpayer with an unwarranted expense. And the Guyana Government already owes The Guyana Elections Commission, money that it has so far refused to pay under the pretext that GECOM must first reconcile the accounts.
When all is said and done it is not expected that more than 7,000 additional persons would be registered. Is it worth it? These people had three years to respond to the new regulations put in place by the Guyana Elections Commission. They chose not to.
Over the past few years there has been a noticeable movement on the part of the government to accommodate people who refuse to adhere to the old order. There was a time when entrance qualifications to tertiary institutions were lowered because the applicants were simply not qualified if the institution were to maintain the usual admission standards. The result is that we produced substandard professionals.
The lowering of standards is now said to be contributing to the spate of road fatalities. The people who are supposed to monitor the movement of vehicles on the streets are accused of colluding with the errant road users.
When the minibus crashed on Homestretch Avenue on Monday, many people spoke of seeing policemen turning a blind eye to the malpractices of the driver. This is said to be the case in many other instances.
Poorly maintained vehicles are passed to operate on the roads and the decline in standards continues. The reopening of the period of claims and objections is just a continuing trend.

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