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The wait for a house-lot

Mar 13, 2021 Editorial

Kaieteur News – We invite our fellow citizens, especially those who live in and around the capital city and those who pass through it daily, to journey with us, and they will come across a situation and a set of patient and hopeful people who say so much about what is wrong in Guyana. Most unfortunately, it is of what is too much the accepted norm, and borne with the passiveness of saints and holy men and women.
The situation is one that looks like this. It is 05:00hrs and it is dark. Though it is not chilly, more than a few of the lengthy assembled line of people are huddled within the sparse warmth of a layer of something over shirt or blouse. It is quiet behind the masks now made mandatory by the COVID-19 pandemic, and which are mostly in place. But make no mistake: there is absolutely no social distancing, with a separation of six inches being more observed than the required equivalent number in feet. This predawn gathering has been going on for several months now, and for some of those who come with hope in their hearts, and a flicker of a plan in their heads, they have had to make repeated trips to that government office.
It is the Ministry of Housing on Brickdam, just east of Camp Street. Guyanese gather there daily and almost all day, starting from before 05:00hrs. If Saturdays and Sundays were workdays, then they would have been sure to be there, if only to give themselves a chance at the spinning wheel of the roulette table that is for the high stakes of a coveted house-lot. It is ironic that in a land so huge, and so much so that its neighbours eye large portions of it covetously, that our people born and bred here have to put up with this unending nonsense, this palpable insult and injustice for a piece of land on which to construct a house, something to call their own home.
This has been the situation with government after government, and it stares at us in the face and curses us. For our patience with bureaucracy, with political and professional red tape, that compels the people to line up and bear their chafe for something as basic and dignifying as a house-lot. For sure, the people readying from their places of abode on the East Bank and East Coast, and from other points near and far, and gathering in front of the Housing Office on Brickdam are from the poorer levels of the economic ladder in this country. They do not have the power or privilege to make a well-timed telephone call to a well-connected senior official and get things moving and done in a jiffy. These poorer folk do not sit on boards or high ministerial offices or parliament, and with the luxury of engaging in the now well-practiced sham of ‘recusing’ themselves from deliberations and decisions involving hundreds or thousands of acres of land, prime land.
No, for the most part they are ordinary Guyanese, who have no choice but to fill up forms, line up for as long as it takes, and hope for the best. They have to hope to get there early enough to get a ‘low’ number, and then they have to hope that the ‘big’ ones and well-paying ones do not come out of nowhere and end up in front of the line, while being welcomed warmly and given the full VIP treatment. They have to hope that they would not have been shifted so far down the line, and passed from pillar to post that they have to return another day to endure more long hours of torture. Their hope is that they will walk away that day with something that says that the concrete has occurred, and that the concrete could commence to be poured. Their hope is for that prized Guyanese real estate visa: a piece of paper with a signature and a stamp that says ‘house-lot approved.’
We have a mere 700,000 plus people, and we have been sharing out numerous house-lots on a continuous annual basis (as all Guyana is proudly reminded by one governing political group after another), and yet there is this abomination and disgrace, where Guyanese must rise from their beds at 04:00hrs (or 03:00hrs) and hurry out on dangerous roads to line up for a house-lot. There has been enough time and opportunity to have a more citizen-friendly process, a more citizen-rewarding result. Of course, this is how the regular people are held hostage by politicians and their carefully chosen bureaucrats to torment and hold to ransom those who depend on them for things as routine as a house-lot.

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