Dear Editor,
The various summary reports on TV channels and in the press about the candidatures (parties, groups, individuals) for representation at the forthcoming Local Government (not communities) Elections, gave brief insights into their respective programmes, aspirations, and even reservations about the future prospects of their communities.
But the listener could not detect any reference in explicit terms, to our senior citizens, by no means a proportion of electors to be ignored.
But the extant evidence is that they continue to be mistreated on a monthly basis – those who depend on a meagre old age pension, and others, who, fortunately, may also be eligible for an NIS pension.
But the monthly maltreatment at the post offices does not discriminate. From the first working day of every month, the queues are optimistically too long, resulting in too many despairing at the usual advice of there not being any more money, and having to return very likely to despair again another day.
It defies logic that given the long history of this palpably malfunctioning system by the Guyana Post Office Corporation, no attempt has ever been made to analyse the records of the daily number of payments (as against payees), and make appropriate provisions for minimising the organisational dysfunctionality which results in the profound demeaning of these senior human spirits. Instead, there is the blatant recognition of this discomfiture in the construction of more hard benches in the open air without regard to the impact of sun, rain or flood on these growing hapless, hopeful group of ‘customers’.
In the face of this overcrowding, there is the inexplicable insistence of assigning just a single clerk at the Campbellville and Kitty Post Offices, for example, to serve resigned and respectful queues. The latter simply have no voice. The cost of disappointment can be more than financial, in the case of those who are disabled and must have helpers.
Those of us who could afford to wait till the second working week also regularly experience the money shortage – for total NIS and Old Age Pension payments on the first visit, and then return again.
It simply has to be experienced to understand the depth of the Corporation’s inhumanity to senior citizens, and more.
Yours faithfully,
E.B. John
