City Hall turning a blind eye

Dear Editor,

Georgetown is the capital city of Guyana but it’s in a very bad state because of the amount of vagrants, touts, beggars, thieves, and white collar crooks.

I wish to begin my discourse with the vagrants. The word vagrant can be defined as: “One who has no established residence and wanders idly from place to place without lawful or visible means of support.”

As I walked around the Guyana Post Office Corporation building I counted over 20 vagrants sleeping on cardboard. They eat, sleep, urinate and defecate there, which makes that place a living hell for shop owners, citizens and those who work at GPOC. But they don’t stop there, they have extended their living quarters down to Fogarty’s building doing their same filthiness but the administrators at City Hall puts a blind eye to all the filthiness from these vagrants.

It makes us look really bad when foreigners visit. We have a large number of new Ministries with competent educated ministers but none seem to see these vagrants, nor a need for a building to house these vagrants.

If it’s the Ministry of Social Protection or the Ministry of Social Cohesion or the Ministry of Human Services they need to build a living quarters for these vagrants to keep the city clean. They will clean them up, train them and put them in a rehab centre since most of them are young and can work before their lives are destroyed by drugs and alcohol.

City Hall is very busy with getting parking meters to suck every dollar out of citizens of Georgetown; they should now be busy to build a house for these vagrants who beg with children on the pave; so that we can have a good and green clean environment.

We have endless beggars all over Georgetown, most of whom are women with children. These same children from unwanted fathers and poor mothers grow up to be bandits and criminals. Millions were wasted on the Jubilee celebrations, why not spend Taxpayers money on building homes for the poor and needy and help them and their children, to be a better citizen of this beautiful land of ours?

I hope the Minister of Finance will put housing for vagrants in his next budget. Guyana is a nation dying slowly in poverty and human degradation while our leaders drive Hummers and Cadillacs.

Now I come to the touts who make the bus- and car-parks a living hell while they rob people from time to time or set thieves to rob people, they need to be picked up by the police and be given jobs to clean the city.

These touts are all over from the Courts, GRA, Immigration, Banks and other Ministries, they always seem to be connected to a white collar criminal who can get you a document instantly for a nice fat price. So we can see corruption is still the order of the day, you are pushed around daily at offices for a document all because you have to ”grease somebody palm”. Is this the good and green economy we want for Guyana?

The thieves lurks all over from banks, courts, embassies, ministries watching like vultures for who to pounce on next. We now run out of jail space for young thieves who just want to live like parasites on innocent citizens who work hard for their money.

If we enforce more serious laws in Guyana we will live in a better society. Drugs destroy people, it drives them to be thieves and makes them vagrants, yet many law-makers are calling for legalizing marijuana.

Guyana needs a new vision of honest political leadership that will take us into this new contemporary era for us to compete with the world. We must have a vision to eradicate poverty from our society, begging, stealing, corruption and crime.

Crime has plagued this nation for a very long time. What Guyana needs is a better economic policy, through implementing better salaries for our citizens of at least $140,000 per month for the average government worker. The police, teachers, public servant, and labourers will live in Guyana and not run out for better jobs and living standards. We have to learn to keep our people.

If the politicians can eat turkey and steak then we ought to be able to afford the same. A true leader will put others before himself because of his love and concern for his people.

Yours faithfully,

Rev Gideon Cecil