The troubles in the system

Aug 06, 2011 Editorial

A birth certificate is perhaps one of the most important documents that one can ever possess. Without it one can get nothing—not an identification document, a travel document or anything that would allow passage across borders.
Anyone applying for a passport knows the importance of a birth certificate. Whatever is written thereon is what would prevail on any subsequent document. Of course, many people are called names other that what is on the birth certificate. These people then go through life firmly in the belief that what they are called is actually their name until they are confronted with the reality.
When these people have to seek a document that is premised on a birth certificate they then confront difficulties. In the first instance, the information presented to the General Registrar’s Office, if premised on what operates (the call name instead of the recorded name) will present difficulties. The base document would not be found.
It is this that helped transform the General Registrar’s Office into a whipping boy these past few months. Five years ago the Guyana Elections Commission announced that no one would be issued with an identification card unless that person could provide a birth certificate that would ensure registration.
Many people had already possessed this source document, having had to rely on it for a number of things, not least to get married or to acquire a passport or to acquire a visa to travel to certain countries. Here were those who needed the document to enter schools for the first time, either at the nursery, primary or secondary levels.
But there were those who might have had an old document but many could not take the time to care the document and therefore did not have any. Some people never had to rely on this document until today. These were the people who not only waited until the last minute to become registered but who simply did not have the birth certificate.
The more enterprising would have acquired a document that might have not been legitimate but for the purposes of national registration, the legitimacy does not matter. At least this is what the Chairman of the Commission has said. And indeed, he does not have the wherewithal to check on the authenticity of any document although he should. He has been liaising loosely with the General Registrar’s Office ever since the national registration process began. He knows the difficulty his request would cause, given the volume.
The people who were conducting the house-to-house registration certainly could not check the authenticity because they needed to know the numbers issued on the forms and the like. However, GECOM could have done this by forwarding the information to the GRO.
We begin to get an idea of what happens at the GRO when we consider the impact that the request for certificate verification would have caused.
Working for the basic minimum wage the staff that write up the certificates would produce between 1,500 and 2,000 certificates per day. This is no easy task. The applications are made through the post office so there is a record. The post office forwards the applications and sends the researchers to the archives. Once found, the material is sent to these lowly paid employees who must produce the certificate.
This has been the rate of production for some time now. The elections period merely placed more load on the system.
The archives must be among the best kept with records dating back to the 1800s. The floods could never touch the documents but time can and does. Records dating back to 1987 are computerized. The rest are in bound volumes. These need to be preserved. It is a costly exercise but the state owes it to the people of this country to ensure that every record of birth, marriage or death that occurs in this country is stored for posterity.
We do not know if approaches have been made to the government but even without a formal request, the government should know that this is a task that must be undertaken. Document retrieval would be easier, the records would be stored away from the elements and above all, there would be no chance of misplaced records.
But despite the shortcomings, one thing is clear; no longer do people have to fork out money to touts to procure a birth or any other certificate issued by the GRO. The system is working at last. But for the extended period of claims and objection, this would not have been known.

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