This is a great country with great people

Oct 21, 2016 Letters

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Dear Editor,

This is a great country and we are a great people! We are a proud people, an honest people, a respectful people, a proper people a hardworking people. I have heard it said that one out of every three Guyanese is dishonest, but even if that is the case, it means that two out of every three Guyanese are honest and therefore we should not accept that all 750,000 of our citizens must be treated like criminals. We must demand more creativity and innovation from the Trinidad, Barbados and other security services and we must do it for the two out of every three Guyanese who are honest. This is not the Guyana the Free that I envisaged!
Someone once told me that everybody has a price and it just depends on the amount. But that is not true; there are some Guyanese for whom no price would make them compromise the core of who they are what they represent. The fact that flights and passengers leaving Guyana having gone through security checks here, have to go through the same security checks in Trinidad, whether the passengers remain on the aircraft or disembark and re-board, says that the Trinidad security do not have confidence in our airport security. Now don’t let us be too quick to criticize the Trinidad security, let’s look at what went wrong with our institutions and our people.
For the past five years I have been studying the ‘behaviour of the Guyanese society – the individual, institutional, organizational (legal and illegal) and the societal aspects’. President Granger said that he will bring an end to Narco Trafficking and stated that it is the core of crimes in Guyana, but this will require a number of profound changes to be made at the individual, institutional and societal levels. We will examine the institutional aspect, human development and a bit of religion.
Let’s start with organizations: Criminal organizations are established with similar structures as legal organizations. They have management and subordinates and provide products and services. The difference, however, is that the nature of business is illegal. For example, cocaine is one of the products that criminal organisations produce which is an illegal product. Criminal organisations also have to find markets for their products and they have both local and foreign markets. They also have a supply chain to supply these markets; hence there is an ‘export’ component to their business.
They also provide services, for example killings, it is not that all killings are illegal, the Police is involved in killings too, but the operations of the Police is covered by legislations. Further, criminal organisations engage in a similar recruitment process like other organisations, and the most appropriate skills are recruited. In the case of Guyana as a trans-shipment point, security personnel and port authorities and employees will be among the most qualified. Hence, the situation with the integrity issues with the Guyana airport security, it is about cause and effect. The Trinidad security are responding and have devised a solution which they have determined to be best for them, however, too many innocent people are affected by this solution, so there is a need to review and revise this approach.
In the President’s quest to reduce the crime or the power of criminal organisations, there is need for profound changes in the legal organisations/institutions. The Money Laundering Bill and other such legislations are essentially to put a structure in place to provide these institutions with greater power to address the issue of illegal business in criminal enterprises. Establishing order at the individual, institutional and societal levels is also very important.
Another area that needs to be addressed is the Government’s ability to increase choices and expand opportunities for the employees working in organisations which are most valuable to the business of criminal organisations, such as port authorities, security personnel, justice system, etc. For example, if a criminal organisation recruit’s one of the ground handlers at the airport, what they are essentially saying to the person in the offer, is, if you provide the service required, your choices and opportunities will be increased in return. So, the ground handler provides the service and may have the opportunity to purchase a car or a home in a short time and without the bureaucracy of financial institutions.
Let’s look at the impact of corruption and how it reduces choices and opportunities for citizens and impacts negatively on human wellbeing. Human development is fundamentally about achieved wellbeing. Let’s take the $600M that is unaccounted for by the Ministry of Public Service and let’s translate it into choices and opportunities, specific to scholarships. We will divide the $600M in half, $300M as payment for scholarships for Law students to complete the Hugh Wooding Legal Certificate and $300M for scholarships for students to complete a four year degree at the University of Guyana at $ 900,000 for the four years. The $300M would have provided scholarships for 50 Law students at $6M per students for the two years. The other $300M would have provided scholarships for 334 students for a four year period at UG. This would have meant 384 more graduates for the country. Even if some of them had become taxi drivers, they would have been taxi drivers with degrees. This means that there would have been a larger body of knowledge in the country to enable its growth and development.
Audreyanna Thomas

Editor’s note: This is the continuation of Ms. Thomas letter carried in our Thursday edition, captioned; “At the Trinidadian Airport, I felt like a refugee.”

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