What development?

Jan 08, 2025 Letters

Dear Editor,

We are hearing so much about how the country is being developed by road construction and high buildings. But listening to the 94.1 FM jump start radio programme just over the last week, here are some of the other stories coming in.

There is a lot of talk about the high cost of living, health and medication. Poor people are struggling to make ends meet on a day-to-day basis to feed themselves and family.

Old age pensioners are complaining about not having their pension books, shut-in pensioners can’t have access to their books. Why are they being treated in such a manner? Pensioners are the ones who worked and helped develop this economy, and now they have to deal with the long lines, the long waits, and the way they are being spoken to by workers who have to serve them. So many of them depend on their pensions for survival – it’s not a want, it’s a need. They have worked hard and earned the right to be treated with respect.

The treatment of pensioners is the same as the treatment of those who lined up for the one-off Government grant, the lines, the pushing around, the waiting only to learn that their names are not there. At the NIS in Brickdam, look at the way people were treated by the man who was sharing out numbers, some of them had to pick up their number from the ground as he cut it off a list with a scissors. This is disgusting.

Then we are hearing about the attendants at the Georgetown public hospital: When pensioners visit the hospital alone, they are treated with disrespect, there are no attendants to support them and oftentimes they are treated with disrespect.

People are also being treated harshly by the security guards, and especially when entering the emergency section, you are told that you can’t sit inside with your relative and that only the person that is sick can be inside and you have to go outside.

There is a reason why poor people go the public hospital when they are sick because they do not have the money to go to the private ones, yet you are often sent to the private hospital to do X-ray and ultra sounds where it is costly because the Public Hospital machines are often times not working.

It is a crying shame when persons who cannot afford to do the ultra sounds and x-rays at the private hospitals are often leave with the worrying of knowing what really happen to them.

In this oil rich country where a lot of money is being invested in fancy government buildings, roads and bridges why can’t the public hospital be fully equipped with working machinery? This alone tells a story of how caring about old/poor people is our government. This is development? These are just some of the stories we heard on the radio this past week.