President Jagdeo’s iteration of plans to equip poorer households with a laptop will no doubt be subject to intense dissection by critics and supporters alike. With a figure of US$30M over three years being mooted, there will have to be a lot of explaining as to why he intends to saddle a new administration with a massive programme it may not agree with. He will also have to defend how to overcome myriad problems such as parameters for identifying beneficiaries, ensuring that the recipients want the laptops and will make beneficial use of them, accountability for the laptops and the thefts and conversion they are likely to inspire, reliable power supply, surge and virus protection and the not so insignificant matters of internet costs, maintenance and repairs.
This initiative must also feed into a well-crafted strategy to nurture the output from the experiment. Aside from learning to surf the net what exactly will the adults and children be streamed into? Would the adults be potentially employable at call centres which may be in the works? Will complementary computer classes be made available to them? Will the children be able to pursue education in virtual classrooms without having to trudge to school under the weight of heavy backpacks? In other words there has to be a major fleshing out of this proposal. No more random words and thoughts before any expenditure of the scale of US$30M.
The President’s announcement is not however the object of this editorial. It is to put into clearer perspective the inspiring and at the same time gut-wrenchingly sad story of 68-year-old Rajmonie Tombie and her grandchildren. One tragic night, afflicted by the uncontrollable sickness that has consumed so many Guyanese men, Tombie’s son murdered his wife Sabrina Fredericks. He then set about poisoning four of his children who were present in the house before taking his own life. Luckily the children survived. Now orphaned, it was their grandmother Rajmonie who rose to the occasion.
With little means at her disposal Rajmonie put her love for her grandchildren above all else. She made the courageous and monumental decision to keep them together and under her care even though there was no obvious way at the time that she would be able to. And as she had declared in an interview six years ago she was determined to keep them with her and together even if all she could afford to give them was “salt and rice”. The odds would have been heavily stacked against her considering that she was dependent on old age pension and charitable gestures.
Six years on, however, Rajmonie has marvellously defied the odds. Not only has she kept the family together but the children are clearly making progress and can dream dreams the way their peers do despite the trauma of losing their parents and the uncertainty that lay ahead. By any benchmark, Rajmonie has made a Herculean effort despite not being sure from day to day what the fate of this family would be. As she told Stabroek News during an interview last week, raising the children was a struggle “but whatever ah get me does give dem; dem very contented. I always make sure that at mealtime dem must get something to eat; me don’t lef dem mouth dry…” The day after her story appeared in this newspaper, help arrived for Rajmonie from expatriates Antje and Zakaria El Dib and this led the grandmother to say she had felt as if she was getting help from nowhere until the El Dibs arrived following the publication of the story.
In fairness, in the aftermath of the murder/suicide there was an outpouring of support but as is inevitable once interest wanes, fatigue sets in and officialdom is blind, even the neediest case is forgotten. Is this to be the fate of this family which has endured so much over so short a span? Can it really be that the PPP/C and its bevy of ministers who bear some responsibility in relation to the welfare of this family could be so oblivious to their needs?
As we have advocated before, families such as Rajmonie and her grandchildren should never be off the government radar. They should be actively sought out by roving officials in place of the wasteful Cabinet outreaches that President Jagdeo and his ministers seem fond of. These families fall into the category of extreme poverty which interestingly Mr Ralph Ramkarran has said would be his number one priority if he was given the opportunity to be the PPP’s candidate and the country’s leader.
As of now the needs of Rajmonie’s family are simple but pivotal to their advancement. They require school gear, one child needs transportation assistance as she will be proceeding to school 10 miles away, one dropped out of school and should be helped to get back into the system and the eldest child had been hoping to write the Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate but was unable to do so. He took up planting a kitchen garden but a flood put paid to that and he was left to do hunting in the backdam. Thankfully, the El Dibs have raised the prospect of finding a job for him so that he could help Rajmonie with the younger children. Two of the girls would like to have their skills enhanced and their current abode needs repairing.
What would this family for instance do when President Jagdeo’s laptop arrives? There would be wonderment and excitement but it would hardly provide the basic needs that this family desperately needs to prosper and to make their own way. That is one of the yet unanswered flaws in President Jagdeo’s design. Don’t come top down with a nebulous concept for families like Rajmonie’s. The government should by all means pursue its plan to take ICT to needy families but it must first address the deep-seated poverty that clearly exists and which is brought to the fore ever so often. Just a fraction of that US$30M could make a world of difference to Rajmonie’s family and others like it.
President Jagdeo should enquire from his ministers of labour, human services, education and housing what structured help any of them have given to Rajmonie’s family and if not what inhibited them from doing this. Governance cannot be about capturing public attention with grandiose projects; it has to be about providing tangible help to those who really need it. Rajmonie and her family fit that bill. She is a home-grown hero and should have been treated as such. Can the government now give her and her family the attention they deserve and begin looking for other families in dire straits?
