Waiting for the Day of Retirement

Feb 11, 2026 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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(Kaieteur News) – Any visit to a government office involves waiting. Not the heroic kind of waiting but the quieter, existential waiting where time stretches, your number never comes up, and you begin to suspect you may die clutching a file folder. Still, the waiting has its compensations. If you pay attention, a government office is less a place of business than a center of the absurd, with free admission and no intermission.

The real tragedy is that policymakers never get to see this show. They don’t wait. Waiting is for civilians. The policymakers have emissaries, assistants, drivers—people whose sole function is to wait on their behalf and then report back, “Yes Minister, it was terrible.” As a result, our leaders are denied the anthropological insights available to anyone who has spent three hours under a flickering fluorescent light watching bureaucracy metabolise itself.

Within most public offices, you will inevitably spot one employee who stands out—not because of brilliance, but because they appear to be haunting the building. This person is usually a survivor of the old public service, an era when a pen, a ruler, and a typewriter were considered advanced technology. Over time, the job has evolved, knowledge has expanded, computers have arrived like uninvited in-laws, and this employee has become… decorative.

They are often only a few years from retirement and have outlived their usefulness, which is not a moral failing—time outlives us all—but an administrative one. Retraining them makes about as much sense as enrolling a 65-year-old in an online coding course. So, they sit. They twiddle. They stare into space with the calm of monks who have taken a vow of inactivity.

When they notice you observing them, however, they spring into action, performing what can only be described as interpretive labour. Papers are shuffled. Drawers are opened and closed. A pen is lifted, examined thoughtfully, and put down again, as if it has disappointed them personally. Nothing is achieved, but the appearance of effort is maintained, which in government counts for a great deal.

If the employee has a supervisory role and must sign a document, the ritual becomes solemn. The paper is scrutinised the way a doctor examines a patient who is clearly already dead. There is a lot of nodding, some murmuring, and finally a signature that confers no new information but offers psychological closure to everyone involved.

These employees are not working so much as enduring. They are waiting for retirement the way others wait for enlightenment or the Second Coming. Each day is a small humiliation bravely borne in the name of a pension and a lump sum that promises escape. With this payoff, they dream of buying a car for hire, opening a shop, paying off a mortgage, or simply staying home and never again pretending to look busy.

So, they pass the time watching the younger employees—the frighteningly educated ones with multiple degrees, seven or eight subjects, and enough computer certificates to wallpaper a small apartment—do most of the actual work. This, incidentally, is exactly what they themselves once did when they were young, energetic, and part of a public service that no longer exists.

The modern public service is a different animal altogether. Entry-level jobs are no longer filled by people who simply finished secondary school and showed up with hope in their hearts. Now they arrive armed with specialised skills, market-rate expectations, and the unsettling habit of knowing what they’re doing. Salary bands, once neat and comforting, have collapsed under the weight of reality. A hydrological engineer, it turns out, cannot be paid the same as an electrical engineer, no matter how much we wish equality would simplify payroll.

And so, the public service now contains a strange mixture: brilliant, talented professionals bursting with energy—and others who are essentially on administrative life support. The latter group does not want to be there. They want to be retired. They are waiting to be retired. Frankly, they would appreciate some help.

This is where voluntary retirement packages come in—humane, practical, and already proven to work elsewhere. Many employees with a few years left would gladly accept early retirement if it came without punishment. The government briefly flirted with this idea in the early 1990s, then panicked, fearing no one would take it. Times have changed. Salaries have risen, benefits have grown, and the payoff now looks less like a consolation prize and more like a liberation.

Offering voluntary retirement would slim the bureaucracy, create openings for sharp young people, and—most importantly—allow a large number of weary souls to stop pretending to examine documents and finally get on with their lives. And that, in a government office, would be nothing short of a miracle.

(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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• Peeping Tom, pensioners, policymakers, retirement

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