Dear Editor,
I ask citizens to associate with a troubling picture, now a daily occurrence for close to a hundred days. It is degrading to one and all.
The citizen would be retired if she was a public servant. She is diabetic. The joints might be a bit sore. Now, there she is standing outside the Guyana Passport Office on Camp Road at 06:30hrs. The hour is young, but here the number is 186. Apparently, no one informed her of 04:00hrs. Then the rains came. A policeman brusquely directs the waiting to the holding pen. How else can it be described? These citizens might as well be deportees waiting for a hearing. The holding pen would be the chain linked area immediately north of the Passport Office itself. It is a desultory site, of sheep channelled and corralled into submissive postures; there are little ones and old ones in the mix.
Editor, something is terribly wrong when this daily ordeal, this spectacle, of citizens lined up in bovine docility to wait for an item as basic as a passport. I mean, it is not a blood transfusion for a rare blood type or for a matching kidney. But obtaining a passport in Guyana has assumed all the complexities and duration of either one of those medically related screening processes.
Consider this: it takes almost an entire working day to start this time-consuming, humiliating process. Count it: from 04:00hrs to 09:30hrs is five-and-a-half hours. Throw in lunch, not taken, and it is a full day. As a further public service, applicants are advised that their own portable toilet should be a mandatory travel companion. However regarded, this has to be the Guyanese equivalent of forcing citizens (peasants) to kowtow, to offer bureaucratic obeisance. If the responsible Minister is not embarrassed, I would think (and hope) that the President is. If the responsible Minister cannot do anything, and does not want to go, then I respectfully urge the President to fire him. Today! Now! Immediately!
If the responsible minister is given an extended lease on life (this is Guyana, after all), I venture to offer the following band-aids: 1) extend the regular working week hours of the Passport Office by starting at 06:00hrs and finishing at 20:00hrs; 2) add Saturdays from 06:00hrs to 12 noon to the service offered; 3) consider a long-term (not permanent) shift system; and 4) decentralize quickly to Berbice, Linden, Essequibo, and Lethem. Show the people that their interests are indeed paramount.
I appreciate that manpower is a problem, and that training is time consuming. In the world from which I come, no executive was interested in problems encountered, only in the solutions tendered, and that they actually work. Thus, something has to give. Or someone has to go. I volunteer the Minister’s head. This has gone on for too long.
Yours faithfully,
GHK Lall
