The very painstaking work entailed by the house-to-house registration exercise has revealed the number of persons who were unable to register because they didn’t have the all-important birth certificate in their possession. Based on figures released by the Guyana Elections Commission (GECOM), 33,827 persons could not be registered because they did not have birth certificates. Of this number 11,370 had applied for and were waiting for birth certificates. The total figure is not inconsequential, representing 7.8% of the total number of persons registered.
It is unclear how long these persons were waiting for birth certificates but it is known that members of the public have frequently complained about the difficulties and delays in obtaining these documents. If these problems permeate important enumerations such as for the elections then they can potentially disenfranchise persons especially those who may not persist with efforts to obtain the certificates.
GECOM, in a recent release, said that in recognition of the seriousness of the problem, it developed a special project aimed at providing birth certificates for all of the affected persons but that it had not found favour with the Minister of Home Affairs, Mr Clement Rohee. Why this is so is unclear. However, it must be a source of concern that close to 34,000 persons are without birth certificates. There is no guarantee that even in the upcoming continuous registration exercise that these persons would be registered as they would not be visited at their homes and might make no effort to advance their quests for the birth certificate. GECOM has however compiled a list of names and addresses of persons who could not registered for the want of birth certificates and if there is no special effort to deal with this affected cohort it will forward the list to the General Register Office (GRO) requesting that action be taken to ensure that birth certificates are provided. What effect or influence such correspondence will have on the GRO is unclear since public offices tend to be influenced only by the directives emanating from within their respective ministries.
That nearly 34,000 people eligible for registration are without birth certificates is also an indicator that many of these persons may fall outside of official statistics that are collected in other ways and certainly the data provided by the GRO. This statistic should lead to a careful examination of the data collected by GECOM to determine whether geographical or other factors may be the reason why these persons have not been able to acquire certificates and corrective action taken.
Anecdotally, it has been apparent for sometime that children are unable to enter the formalized school system because their parents aren’t bothered about obtaining birth certificates for them or are deterred by the nature of the system. The statistic generated from the registration exercise should also stimulate some internal examination of the public services provided under the Home Affairs Ministry and how they can be updated.
There have been complaints in the past about the GRO and the birth certificate application process. By way of comparison we referred sometime ago in these columns to the ease with which applications for birth certificates and their delivery were now being done in Trinidad and Tobago.
While skilled forgers continue to beset documentation services such as those provided by the GRO there is no reason why this should impede its modernisation. Again, under the Home Affairs Ministry, the process for the new machine readable passports remains centralized and tiresome. Applicants from all parts have to travel to the capital and line up from early in the morning outside the passport office – sometimes having to come back the next day or spending an entire day there. The government has no immediate plans to change this based on the response to a question posed in Parliament but surely in a country with diverse communities sprawled left, right and centre such a system is untenable and backwards. Previous breaches of security where passports have been stolen have no doubt caused a battening down of the hatches and unacceptably tight control of the process.
The Home Affairs Ministry has to show that it is capable of orchestrating the decentralization of the process – within reason – without compromising the security of the system. That is the challenge it should derive from this process and the recent revelations about birth certificates.
