Most post offices in Guyana, particularly the rural outposts, are small, inconspicuous fragile-looking buildings, not attended by much evidence of security. They appear decidedly vulnerable to break-ins. Historically, post office transactions have included the sale of postage stamps, money orders, licences of one sort or another, the processing and delivery of letters and the transmission of telegrams.
Even in those days, when post offices were much more frequently used places of business than they are these days, their transactions generated insufficient cash to make them prime targets for bandits. In fact, during the period immediately following the establishment of the country’s first post office around 1796, the revenue generated by the service was so insignificant that sometimes those amounts were insufficient to meet even the salary of the post master. The deficit had to be met as a subsidy from the colony’s revenue. The early years of the postal service in British Guiana were reportedly so mired in inefficiency that responsibility for its administration had to be removed from the local colonial administration and passed directly to London. For a subsequent period, efforts to improve the efficiency of the postal service led to a decision to assign policemen the responsibility for delivering mail.
The types of transactions for which the local postal service was known over the years have long been in decline, and though additional functions have been assigned to the service,, the institution as a whole, particularly the small rural outposts, are considered relatively low-risk targets as far as robbery is concerned. Internal fraud is generally believed to be much the greater threat.
This, of course, is not to say that the contemporary postal service does not serve some important functions like the country-wide delivery of important bills and notices. (telephone, water and electricity bills and correspondence from state-run institutions like NIS and GRA come readily to mind). They also facilitate the disbursement of old age pensions making them repositories for large sums of cash for brief periods. It is during this brief period the small, rural post offices become an inviting target for bandits.
To even contemplate the use of a rural post office as a sufficiently secure facility to serve as an overnight repository for millions of dollars is, without question, an act of unfathomable folly. What with all the evidence of the increasing daring and ingenuity of bandits, mobilizing the equipment and skills to ‘torch’ a metal safe is hardly a day’s work, particularly in circumstances where the incentive is $5.7M, the amount reportedly taken from the BV Post Office last week; and if the decision to have that amount left inside the post office was an act of the most unsound judgment, the failure on the part of the competent authorities to trouble themselves to assign even so much as an overnight baton guard to the building adds an embarrassing dimension of insult to the injury of leaving the money there in the first place. On top of all that the question may well be asked as to whether it may not have been prudent to take the trouble to ask the BV Police Station – situated barely two minutes drive from the post office – to periodically patrol the vicinity throughout that night?
When all of the aforementioned considerations are taken account, the comments attributed to GPOC Chairman Juan Edgill in the wake of the robbery appear almost surreal. To admit to an awareness “that the post office has been under threat as it relates to security” and, in the face of a break-in at another rural post office a matter of days earlier, to leave such a sum of money in a small, rural post office without the presence of so much as a guard demands more than “an internal investigation.” It requires a cold and sober review of the managerial acumen and sense of judgment of the entire top brass of the GPOC, not excluding the Board itself. The litany of fundamental errors in judgment and failure to apply a measure of good, old-fashioned sense demands that such an enquiry be undertaken.
Of course “enough was not done to safeguard the assets of the state,” said Mr Edgill. To say so, frankly, is to state the patently obvious. In fact, it appears that sorry little was done. The issue that needs to be dealt with is why wasn’t enough done, enough, that is, to ensure that, setting aside the seriously flawed decision to leave that sum of money inside the Post Office overnight in the first place, there was at least a minimum security presence to deter the thieves or to raise an alarm when the building was being broken into. What excuses do those responsible for these fundamental security omissions have?
By Mr Edgill’s own account the operation by the bandits would have required some measure of organization and, moreover, would have taken some time. What he concedes, in other words, is that the presence of a security guard and/or periodic police patrols would almost certainly have prevented the robbery. Why then were these basic security measures not taken?
And if, as Mr Edgill argues, the civic responsibility of communities includes doing what they can to protect community and state property, his admonition that “we have to do better than we are doing” amounts to a red herring, a disingenuous distraction from the central issue. Indeed, his remark applies in infinitely greater measure to the GPOC itself, which institution bears the substantive responsibility for the security of post offices. It is the GPOC, therefore, that ought to have done better, far better.
The BV Post Office robbery, unlike the majority of robberies these days where terror and violence are ruthlessly applied, compelling victims to part with their possessions in exchange for their lives, was altogether avoidable. It was one of those cases in which an absence of rational decision-making on the part of those responsible for protecting the stolen money was manifest. The incident requires – as has already been stated – a thorough investigation that clearly identifies both those functionaries directly responsible for the effort in judgment and those who failed in their overarching responsibility to ensure that the security measures were effectively implemented. While we agree that the events at BV have now compelled the management of the GPOC to undertake a complete review of its security arrangements, an equally important question is why was all this not done long before now anyway.