This intervention was motivated primarily by a report in the Stabroek News that from ten Caribbean programmes which were highlighted as “best practices” for the provision of services to the elderly by the Third Regional Intergovernmental Conference on Ageing in Latin America and the Caribbean, which took place recently in Costa Rica, Barbados was recognised for three of its programmes: the Home Care Programme, Nursing Pilot Project and its Information Communication Technology Programme.
Further, there have also been many letters in the press lamenting the insufficiency of adequate facilities for the elderly in Guyana and the need for urgent government action. And recently, a “Guyana’s National Report on Aging, 2012” was completed and the National Commission on the Elderly reappointed. All these factors suggested to me that the time might be right for us to take a closer look at what should be provided for the elderly, what is at present being provided and what needs to be done.
Not unlike the truism that is casually bandied about young people representing the future, and therefore should be treated and provided for as such, we also hear quite a lot about the contributions the elderly have made to our current wellbeing and thus the need for society to take care of them at this stage of their lives. However, exhortations can differ markedly from results, and where the allocation of public resources is concerned it is the constituency with the greater political weight that usually takes the cake. So it is incumbent upon any social group that wishes to safeguard its interest to establish its own independent organisation to mobilise, articulate and struggle for that interest.
In numerical terms, if properly organised and mobilised, particularly in the close electoral context that presently exists in Guyana, the elderly population could have serious political leverage. The 2002 census shows that the elderly population is rising and politically substantial. While in 1991 there were some 43,000 60+ year olds, that figure had risen to nearly 47,000 by 2002. By simple extrapolation, today over 50,000 voters – worth about 10 seats in the National Assembly – are over 60. Of course, as with almost everything in Guyana, our racial divide must be taken into consideration in these kinds of calculations. However, one suspects that generally the condition of the aged is so unacceptable that common ground may be forged around many relevant issues.
At least since the early 1990s, the Ministry of Human Services recognised the importance of the elderly and the need for the establishment of a self-governing organisation of them, and around that time an informal senior citizens committee was formed to chart the way forward. If my memory serves me right, there were rival perspectives on how matters should proceed and in 2002 the National Commission on the Elderly was established in its present form.
It goes without saying that a national commission, which operates at the behest of the government, is quite different from an autonomous organisation that arises from and depends for its existence on its continued relevance to its constituency and this has been most clearly demonstrated by the history of the present national commission.
On Monday 8 November 2010, the chairman of the commission gave Stabroek News a litany of woes. He claimed that although “This is one of the most important commissions in the country…. [w]e are concerned that it is not being encouraged to function for so many elderly persons who are in need of services.” The commission had not then met for two years and although replacements for commissioners who had died had been identified, they were unknown to the surviving nine members because there had been no meetings. He also complained that while Minister Indra Chandarpal had been very active in encouraging and facilitating the work of the commission, subsequent ministers had not been as attentive. On 9 February this year Stabroek News reported that the Commission had not met for four years!
The reason for this kind of neglect is largely because given the commission’s institutional context as essentially an agency of the government with its operations very largely dependent on individual ministers, it can easily fall – and clearly had fallen – off the radar. Indeed, outside of some interest articulation and integration, government really does not need a commission to do what it perceives needs to be done for the elderly and as we shall see, the regime has made some useful interventions and also encouraged others to intervene on behalf of the elderly during the commission’s inactivity.
Nonetheless, the issue is not whether the government took some action to improve the conditions of the aged; it is whether or not the elderly community can feel assured that its interest will be best served without its independent participation in policy formulation and implementation. As I have argued above, this is not usually the case for most constituencies and from complaints in the press this has in fact not been the case with the elderly.
Even if on assessment we find that the regime’s programme is extremely generous to the aged, we must consider such an outcome as merely fortuitous and not the result of activism that consistently focuses on constituency interests. Indeed, just as a good programme can be the result of the regime’s good intentions, so neglect could have resulted from another less concerned regime and no serious social group should lend itself to this kind of vicissitude. Only recently we had the example of the discourse between the government and the opposition about the level of old age pensions, without, from my recollection, any serious support coming from organisations of the aged.
Throughout much of our history we have expected families to take care of the elderly since it is they who have benefited directly from them or that the elderly should have been sufficiently prudent to put aside “something,” for later years. However, it has long been recognised that social living is very complicated and involves many other factors and vagaries. For example, the elderly also made contributions to society and many persons may have come upon misfortunes that were outside their control. Therefore, society needs to make proper arrangements for the elderly but that is unlikely to happen until the latter is properly organised in one or more vibrant autonomous organisation/s and the National Commission on the Elderly, as at present constituted, far from fits the bill! (henryjeffrey@hotmail.com)
