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THE HARDEST JOB IN THE WORLD

Jul 02, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

I empathize with the Minister of Public Security. He has a portfolio that will either make him or break him.
He has the hardest job in the world. Crime has risen since the new government has taken office. The criminal underworld has decided that it really does not give a damn about the new government.  It has decided that it is business as usual.
The underworld intends to carry on with the merry ways of killing, maiming and murdering people. It can do this because they are not afraid of the police. The new Minister has inherited one of the weakest police forces in the world, one in which corruption is rampant. The criminals know this too.
There are businessmen in Guyana who struggle to make a dollar and when they do, a police officer comes knocking asking “for a raise.” The poor businessman knows that he should not refuse. A person employed as a driver, is stopped by a traffic cop. He has to decide whether it will be “left or right”- whether he will leave a raise or have the cop write a ticket.
If the cop writes the ticket that is almost an entire weeks pay gone down the line. What will be left for the driver to take home to his family? Many corrupt cops do not give a hang about the burdens they impose on their victims. It is either their way or the highway. Guyana is a cruel country.
They also know the nature of the society in which they live. Guyana is a rotten country. This country can turn a saint into a crook.
Many visitors do not declare, to the authorities at our airport, the correct location where they will be staying while in Guyana. They lie. They say that they will be staying one place but in effect they are staying at another place.
They are afraid that if they state their correct address that the information would be leaked to the bandits who would attack them. This is the loss of confidence that exists in some of our public institutions and all because people feel that there are links between certain institutions and criminal enterprises.
The criminality in Guyana, however, does not begin at the institutional level. It begins in childhood. I once knew an old couple. They retired long before the National Insurance Scheme existed. So they had no NIS to get and in those days, despite not having anyone to provide for them, they were denied old age pension.
Their main means of survival came from a genip tree in their yard. They would sell the harvest from that tree to residents and they would use the modest sums they received to keep them going.
It did not work out well for them. The young school children would give these old people hell. The children would raid the tree, at times stripping it bare. There would be nothing for the old folks to sell. This was not just theft; it was cruelty to these elders.
They ended up in a public homestead, forced to sell their home, simply because the children in the area would not allow them to make their living from the single genip tree.
Some people believe that farming is easy. Some people believe that they should develop farming areas and put in nice roads so that the farmer can drive on them to get to their farms. The farmers do not want such roads.
They do not want development because it will also allow criminal elements to have easier access to their farms and to raid them.
One of the hardest professions in Guyana is cattle farming. Most cattle farmers are now forced to sleep with their herd or pen them up at nights because if they leave them to graze overnight, the next morning half of the herd would have been stolen by rustlers.
Cash crop farmers also suffer similar losses. They plant and others reap.
Young school children going home from school in the afternoon are accosted by older boys who take away their bus fares and whatever else they can strip these children of.
In workplaces colleagues are stealing from colleagues, down to sanitary napkins.
This is the Guyana we live in. This is the country to which Mr. Ramjattan has to deliver increased public security. I wish him luck.

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