Dear Editor,
Georgetown is the capital city of Guyana but it’s in a very bad state because of the number of vagrants, touts, beggars, thieves and white collar crooks.
As I walked around the Guyana Post Office Corporation building I counted over twenty vagrants sleeping on cardboard boxes. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate there, and that makes the place a living hell for shop owners, citizens and those who work at GPOC. But they don’t stop there; they extend their living quarters down to Fogarty’s building doing their same filthiness, but the administrators at City Hall turn a blind eye. The area stinks from a distance and attracts a lot of flies. There are places near GPOC which sell food and snacks, and Fogarty’s still have their Rose Bud Cafe. How insanitary it is for those who sell food there to inhale the stench from these vagrants, and worse yet to sit and eat there. It makes us looks really bad when foreigners visit the Rose Bud Cafe to eat.
We have a large number of new ministries with lots of competent, educated ministers, but none seem to see these vagrants who make the city worse than a pig pen. If it’s the Ministry of Social Protection or the Ministry of Social Cohesion or the Ministry of Human Services, they need to build living quarters for the vagrants to keep the city clean. They will clean them up, train them and put them in a rehab centre, since most of them are very young and they can work; their lives are being destroyed by drugs and alcohol.
City Hall is very busy with parking meters to suck every dollar out of the citizens of Georgetown, when they should be busy building a house for the vagrants as well as women who beg with over six children on the pave, so we can have a good and green clean environment. We have endless beggars all over Georgetown, most of whom are women with children. These same children grow up to be bandits and criminals. Millions were wasted on the Jubilee, so why not waste taxpayers’ money by building homes for the poor and needy and help them and their children who beg to be better citizens of this beautiful land of ours? I hope the Minister of Finance will put housing for vagrants in his next budget. Guyana is a nation dying slowly in poverty and human degradation while our leaders drive expensive vehicles.
Now I come to the touts: they make the bus and car parks a living hell, and they rob people from time to time or set thieves to rob people. They need to be picked up by the police and given
jobs to clean the city. These touts are all over and can be found at the courts, the GRA, Immigration, banks and ministries. They always seem to be connected to a white collar criminal in an office who can get you a document instantly for a nice fat price. So we can see corruption is still the order of the day; you are pushed around daily at offices for a document all because you have to ‘grease somebody’s palm with some greens.’ Is this the good and green economy we want for Guyana?
The thieves lurk all over at banks, the courts, embassies, ministries watching like vultures from a mountain for someone to pounce on next. We have now run out of jail space for young thieves who just want to live like parasites on innocent citizens who work hard for their money. If we enforce more serious laws in Guyana we will live in a better society; it’s very sad that those who make the laws break the laws. Drugs destroy people and drive them to be thieves and vagrants, yet many lawmakers are calling for marijuana to be legalised.
Guyana needs a new vision of honest political leadership that will take us into the contemporary era so we can compete with the world. We must have a vision to eradicate poverty, begging, stealing, corruption and crime from our society. Crime has plagued this nation for a
very long time. What Guyana needs is a better economic policy whereby better salaries can be paid to citizens with at least $140,000 per month for the average government worker. The police, teachers, public servants and labourers will then live in Guyana and not run out for better jobs and higher living standards. We have to learn to keep our people. If the politicians can eat turkey and steak then we ought to be able to afford the same. A true leader will put others before himself because of his love and concern for his people.
Yours faithfully,
Rev Gideon Cecil
