Dear Editor,
SN’s Editorial of Friday 4 January, 2019 on ‘A Modernised GPOC’ should have been followed immediately with a very substantive question mark (?), for it makes no reference to the most archaic of deliverables (one refrains from using the expression ‘services’) endured by the citizenry – that is the Parcel Post, embedded as it has been since the colonial days, at the Guyana Post Office Building, wedged in between North Road and Robb Street.
Absolutely nothing has changed. It is simply not possible to post a notebook from Campbellville Post Office say, to Bourda Post Office, or even the very (Georgetown) Post Office.
The title ‘Corporation’ is a euphemism.
It just does not function as a business, even though the technological competition continues to make it increasingly less relevant. The queues there remain steadfastly ‘in-line’, as the ‘services’, so called, remain ‘off-line’, each from changes being effected in the more traditional ‘Public Service’.
One reason for this evident corporate constipation is the indifferent quality of human resourcing, complemented by a depressing work environment, of which poor remuneration must be a component. Note the predominant ethnic preference in recruitment of lowly educated employees – a practice which in turn exposes an image that discourages better equipped interests, while offering little prospect of career succession.
So that the ‘modernisation’ being hyped would have to be driven by a fresh group of intellectually energised persons, to be supported by substantively upgraded categories of job-holders who are willing to respond to the stimuli that must be injected in order to create a more vibrant corporate entity, or for that matter, a more ubiquitous postal parcel.
Make it a truly ‘Generalised Postal Service (not Office)’!
The Corporate motto should be Post-Haste.
Yours faithfully
E.B. John