The fact that even though our two international airports reported earlier this week that they were ready to execute the protocols and procedures associated with the re-opening of the facilities there remaining a measure of public doubt about the wisdom of the decision, is entirely understandable. That doubt, interestingly, may have less to do with the re-opening of the airports, per se, and more to do with concerns over the measures necessary to ensure that the decision is validated by the rigid adherence to the agreed safety-related procedures. In other words it may well be, to a greater extent, a matter of trust.
One might add, in the first instance, that the re-opening of the two airports is part of a package of understandable pushback measures against the rampaging COVID-19 pandemic by government based on the entirely acceptable understanding that for our own survival purposes, we cannot remain in a condition of permanent lockdown. Such a course of action will have its own negative consequences. Conversely, we cannot seek to evade the reality that there is a measure of risk in the decision to reopen the airports as indeed there is in pushing back the boundaries of the curfew. It leaves us with the responsibility to rigidly apply the agreed protocols and procedures with the specific intention of, as far as possible, narrowing the risks.
There is, in the first instance, the official responsibility of ensuring that the personnel assigned to execute the procedures, at all levels, have some measure of training in those procedures and are well briefed on matters of both execution and anomalous or emergency situations. Negative occurrences deriving from poor decision-making by operatives on the ground, whether out of ignorance of procedures or otherwise, should not be lightly excused or wished away. In a circumstance such as this, people who are deemed – hopefully based on some kind of criteria – to be competent to carry out tasks of this magnitude must be held strictly accountable.
There is another equally valid concern here. It derives from an aspect of our behavioural culture that sometimes rather loosely applies exceptions to important rules. COVID-19, insofar as we are aware, is not a particularly discriminating pandemic so that no one, for any reason, must be excused or exempted from the rigours of the protocols and procedures that will be applied at CJIA and the EFCIA when flights begin to arrive here. Here again it must be emphasised that this point is being made against the backdrop of what, in Guyana, is a culture of officially approved exemptions from laid down rules.
Contextually, it is worth repeating that no one, but no one, should arrive at either Timehri or Ogle and thereafter be whisked away in a vehicle outfitted with suitably darkened windows without being made to satisfy the requisite procedures and protocols. And since it is altogether reasonable to assume that such transgressions, if they occur, will be backed by some kind of official imprimatur, the authorities concerned must be ready to shoulder the responsibility for both the transgressions and their consequences, if and when these occur.
We wish the teams assigned to overseeing the procedures associated with the re-opening of the two airports well.
