The system needs to be fixed

Mar 29, 2019 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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The government’s hosting of a massive outreach at the Square of the Revolution was a bad idea on every count. The outreach has backfired on the government, with members of the public having to stand in long lines and sit for extended periods before receiving attention.
The outreach was a publicity gimmick. The government, after almost four years, has suddenly changed gears and is busy going all around the country meeting residents and trying to convince them that the government has their best interests at heart. Wednesday’s outreach was part of the ruling coalition’s hustings.
The outreach was bound to be a political disaster. The government ended up being swamped with complaints and requests for government services. There is no way that the government could have handled the number of persons who descended on the Square of the Revolution, where the outreach was hosted. The government was overwhelmed. And the majority of those present ended up being disappointed and frustrated. Instead of making the government look good, the outreach made the government look bad. It was a public relations disaster.
The government should have anticipated this disaster. There is not a single person in Guyana who does not have problems with one or more agencies of the government; there is hardly a person in Guyana who does not need something from the government. So having an outreach with so many agencies was bound to result in the venue being swarmed by citizens, even more so in the run-up to election when people expect the government to bend over backwards to please them.
Some people are so fed up with some government agencies that they will not turn up. If there was an outreach by the police and the courts, the lines would have stretched from the Square of the Revolution to the Demerara Harbour Bridge.
The government system is not geared to fixing problems. The government is the problem.
The public bureaucracy is organized to frustrate citizens. What people need is less not more government. In a liberal economy, citizens should not have to run to the government for house lots or to have their electricity and water service reconnected. Bureaucracies, by nature, tend to create rather than relieve citizens of their problems.
The system needs fixing. Public servants cannot be expected at an outreach to solve people’s problems. This is not how decisions are made within the public bureaucracy.
Junior civil servants cannot make binding decisions. They can take complaints and pass them on, but not make on-the-spot decisions. The complaint then has to go to a superior who will enter it into a ledger then pass it to a junior supervisor who will add a few comments and then ask someone to investigate. A report then has to be prepared and passed back to the junior supervisor who will then call in the parties and ask for further statements.
When that is finished, a file has to be prepared and passed to a senior supervisor, then to an Assistant Manager and then to the Manager. The Manager then has to have the matter discussed at a committee which meets once a month and only after then will a decision be made. By that time the person who made the complaint would have, out of frustration, given up any hope of having the problem resolved.
The system has to be fixed. The system is rotten. The best way to fix it is to have less government and to allow the market to undertake most of the services provided by government.
There is no need for government, for example, to be providing house lots. There are no more lands available for housing. The government will have to find lands and put in costly infrastructure in order to bring new lands for housing in operation. But there is no need for this.
Guyana does not have a housing shortage. The housing stock is sufficient to cater for twice the population of Guyana. People living outside of Guyana own properties in Guyana, many of which are left empty. They are holding the property for its value to appreciate. Hundreds of houses are owned by absentee owners.
The high value of homes and businesses encourage people to invest in real estate for speculative purposes. The rich are inflating property values in order to increase the value of their holdings.
The price of real estate is outside of the reach of the poor and government’s housing drive has not reduced these prices, even though it has allowed many persons to own a property, which they may have never had a chance before to do. Real estate values are inflated, because the housing market is controlled by the middle and upper classes.
Outreaches are not going to solve the problems of the ordinary man. Those problems require the system, stacked in favour of inefficient and incompetent bureaucrats, and administered in the interests of the rich, to be dismantled and fixed. The government does not have the required fortitude to do so.
And therefore just as how the colonial masters of yore used to throw from their balconies sweets to the oppressed masses, the new rulers offer gimmicks such as the government outreaches of last Wednesday.

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