The post-office: Keep complaining and people will be helped

Oct 03, 2022 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Kaieteur News – This column here is not a comment on the Postmaster-General, Ms. Karen Brown. Ms Brown returned my telephone request last Friday and was the opposite to me in the use of decibels. From our conversation, I would say I like Ms. Brown.

But in writing again on the general post office (GPO) downtown, I feel I am showing my obligation to Guyanese as a person who has been a social activist since I was 16, and that was before more than half of Guyana’s current population was born.

When, on Thursday, I went to the GPO parcel section to send a box to my daughter, there is a large notice facing you. It alerts customers to the fact that GWI bills are not accepted as proof of address, only GPL bills.

The mystery of that struck me intensely. Something had to be wrong there. GPL offers electricity to the nation. GWI offers water. Of the two, GWI is more important to many because if you do not use the internet, then you don’t care about electricity but all humans will die if they don’t have access to drinking water.

I did a column last Friday on my experience at the parcel postage department at GPO (“GRA, CANU, post office and life in Guyana”). I did not mention the GWI thing. I kept it back because I wanted to do a separate article on the issue after speaking to Ms. Brown.

So I put the question to her: Why the GPL paper and not the GWI document? Ms. Brown gave me the reason which I am not going to state here for the deliberate reason of not wanting to embarrass my country because with the new oil era and CPL season, there are countless foreigners in Guyana.

But I would like to inform Guyanese wherever they are who will one day use that parcel postage section that the GWI bill will now be accepted as proof of address. Also driver’s licence can be submitted as identification and proof of address.

The conversation moved on to the scotch tape thing. I did carp in my Friday column that the GPO wants you to bring your own tape to seal your package. Now let’s digress to the courier service named DHL.

When DHL inspects your box, it then seals it using its own tape. How we do know that we are paying for that tape the cost of which may have been tacked on to the price they charge you? DHL users will never know that.

So I suggested to Ms. Brown that GPO do the identical thing DHL does. GPO charges $8000 for the first kilogram then $2200 for every other kilogram. Change that to make it $2400 and use the additional $200 to buy sealing tape.

How would the public know that the additional $200 is for sealing the boxes? They would not and they don’t have a choice as we don’t with DHL. That is the cost for postage and we pay it. I am saying with prodigious confidence – if the GPO puts on an additional $200 for the service, no one will question it.

But do not reduce GPO to a vulgarity by asking customers to bring their own sealing tape. It appears scandalous and in fact, it is. I could understand in the terrible era of the seventies and eighties when the economy had broken down, there was no foreign exchange and every damn thing was in short supply.

In this age, the GPO can afford to buy tape to seal boxes and parcels. I asked Ms. Brown if the GPO would accept a donation of boxes of tapes. She asked if it was coming from me. I told her I would ask business folks I know who would make the donation.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that philanthropist Nazar Mohammed (aka, “Shell’) would gladly give the GPO tons of the material. Ms. Brown responded that she thinks it is inappropriate for me to be asking business people to buy such an item for the GPO so she declined my offer.

To conclude then, I would urge people to complain when things that should be naturally right are offensively wrong in Guyana. It could go either way – you could be ignored or changes can come.

I know there are countless times when the advocacies in these columns were ignored but countless times positive changes came about. I met one of the famous names in gold-mining, the Adams family, in Massay Supermarket and he reminded me that I got the gate security of National Hardware to stop examining the contents of customers’ purchase when they were leaving the store. That was a vulgar invasion of privacy.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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