Home Letters Can the Government put some of the part-time workers to do background...
Dear Editor,
I do not know how many times this phrase has not pulsated your eardrums, “The Government doesn’t help poor people, they are all for themselves”. It keeps reverberating over and over again. Now, the reason for this never-ending complaint stems from the fact that cash grants are being given out, and whenever money is being given out, lots of things begin to happen.
Three scenarios come into play: (a) Everyone suddenly becomes poor, the economic circumstances suddenly take a tragic turn for the worse, everyone comes under the low income, poverty bracket.
(b) Money is “giving away”, so grab as much of it as you can. The dishonesty is evident, as persons went on a rampage in double-dipping and triple-dipping.
And (c) Is Government “ting,” so you don’t have to worry with any paying back of that money. So, once again, grab as much as you can.
Then there is the perennial racial epithet that the Government has to put up with, “The PPP/C doesn’t like Black people.” All of these and more have inundated the landscape once the Government is involved in the giving out of monetary grants. So, with the rolling out of the Flood Relief Grant, there was bound to be controversy, as the above three scenarios took shape. The usual ugly reviews from some sections of the population were high on the airwaves.
I pause here to mention that this dishonesty cuts across party and racial lines; it goes for persons from both sides of the political and racial spectrum. It is not something that is linked to a single political party, but can be traced to all and sundry. Once the money is in circulation, these things surface.
Let me give you an experience I had while waiting in a line to get to the teller at a Republic Bank in Berbice. One woman said to another, “Deh giving out flood relief, and I get money.” The response was, “But how come you get money when you ain’t get damages, nothing flood you out?” The response was, “Well, try find damage, nuh.” The response, “Girl me ain’t able tek jail.”
Now, there are countless other stories that run a similar line like this one, where persons who never had damages benefited while defrauding the system in an immense way. Let’s not fool ourselves, these are real situations involving real people.
To buttress my point, the PNC should give of their experience with GAIBANK. That bank was set up to help farmers get loans in pursuit of their farming business, but the resultant abuse of its service saw its early collapse. Persons who never owned nor leased land, far less was ever engaged in farming, cashed in on the lenient lending privileges of the bank. The repayment of loans was sparse and few, if any, and this led to the bank’s closure.
The present Government would have learned its lesson from the above bad experiences and would have vowed never to repeat it again. For this expressed reason, other cash handouts were directed to the various sectors of the economy, and to selected targeted groups. Why reduce VAT while prices keep going higher and higher in the supermarkets and hardware stores, as the greedy merchants take advantage of the reduction to boost their profit margin? In the end, it is the poor man who gets the worst of it.
Government is now in the business of subsidies; that is, buying the fertiliser and distributing it to the farmers, or giving grants to our fisherfolks. It means that if you are not a farmer or a fisherman, then you cannot benefit, end of discussion! This is a well-thought-out venture that would bring aid to the farmers who really need it, and development to the agricultural sector as a whole.
Just by way of kind advice, can the Government please place some of those part-time workers to do strict background checks on the recipients of these handouts?
Respectfully,
Neil Adams
