A fool and his money

Dec 22, 2013 Features / Columnists, My Column

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I always used to hear the saying, “A fool and his money are soon parted”. My mother would often say that to me when I rushed to spend the ten cents and the pennies that I would collect from neighbours for doing odd jobs. Sometimes I would get a raise from visiting relatives.
So it was that every time I would see the boys heading for the rum shops as soon as they got paid, the thought about the fool and his money would come to mind. Sometimes they would get robbed as they left the rum shops so they would end up going home with precious little or nothing.
It was not until this past week that I realized how many fools we have in the society. There was the Ministry of Works. Admittedly, the money represented what the taxpayers contribute to the national coffers, so in a sense the Works Ministry was not losing its money. Yet the fact that it lost money entrusted to it, highlighted how foolish some people are.
I am not going to carp on the need for bank payments to employees and for people to gravitate to plastic. I have done so far too often, to the point that I now realize that I am merely talking to the breeze. No sooner had I remarked on the foolishness at the Works Ministry than I found a bigger fool, this time a business enterprise.
For an established business to move large sums of money in carton boxes is the most stupid thing anyone can imagine. This business has been in Guyana for decades to the point that it became a household name. For such a successful company, one would believe that it would have a security firm at its disposal to move its money.
The commercial banks do not make light of moving money around to restock the Automatic Teller Machines. They hire security companies with armoured trucks and armed guards. I cannot recall any commercial bank being robbed by gunmen.
One of them was reportedly robbed while transporting money from Berbice, but it turned out that the robbers were the very people transporting the money. They were caught.
Guyana Sugar Corporation, another fool, was not so unlucky when it happened to be moving money to the West Demerara to pay its employees. Some gunmen attacked the vehicle transporting the money and made off with the payroll. However, they did not get far and within hours the sugar company recovered its money.
But there was this business entity seeking to deposit more than $17 million into the bank. A fool and his money are soon parted. The manager packs the money into a carton box and gives it to a clerk. There is this clerk walking about with enough money to build three low cost houses and a buy a car and perhaps a minibus.
Some men, as if by clairvoyance, find out that money is in the carton box and they take it away. There is no comment from the business entity but the clerk is in police custody, whether for being stupid or for being complicit in the act of making the money disappear.
Yet I cannot ignore the fact that the government has made fools of all of us taxpayers. President Bharrat Jagdeo, with much fanfare, announced that he was going to do what England, Canada, the United States and some other developed country have done. He was going to set up closed circuit cameras around the city.
Millions of dollars went into the project which was supposed to put a dent on crime in the city.  Many people thought that they would now see fewer carjackings, fewer robberies and even fewer incidences of the police using excessive force. The cameras would have been like the proverbial all-seeing eye.
But this is not to be and there are no explanations. Some gunmen shot and killed a policeman under the eyes of one of the cameras and there was no record of what happened. In fact, it turned out that there were commentators who claimed that the government set up that particular camera to keep an eye on protesters walking along Regent Street.
So we have this $17 million heist in a city where the cameras are supposed to be pervasive. It must be that they are blind and are in need of surgery. But then again, the technician who installed them probably fleeced the government.
I asked the Cabinet Secretary about these cameras and he told me that they are not for real-time use, that people would have to check the footage gathered by the cameras and make a determination of the situation.
He however promised that before long, with the advent of the e-governance cable, everything would be real-time. Well the advent of the cable may be decades away.
So for now, we have paid huge sums for the authorities to keep an eye on criminal activity in the city. But it is left to us to keep an eye on the situation and then report to the authorities.
This lapse does not make the Works Ministry and the business entity bright. It does not change their status from ‘fools’. Imagine putting money in a carton box and sending a lone clerk without security to a commercial bank.
At last someone or something made me in my old age understand what my mother used to tell me.

 

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