The whole country should do what the NIS has done
Kaieteur News – Bureaucratic laws were never intended to be cast in cement. Context is everything in life. There are times when regulations have to be addressed in some contexts with reason. I don’t think there has ever been a time in the history of this country when presidents Forbes Burnham, Cheddi and Janet Jagan, Sam Hinds, Desmond Hoyte, Bharrat Jagdeo and Donald Ramotar stepped out of the president’s compound and came back half an hour later and the security details at the gate fried them and asked for an ID.
I was behind the then Vice-Chancellor, James Rose, when he entered the AS library. All visitors to the library must show their AS Identity. The guard did not ask me or Dr. Rose wants to know us. It was very foolish to do so because the guard knew that Dr. Rose was the head of the university and knew who I was. That is called flexible bureaucracy.
AS Registrar and I were personal friends when we made our first degree in history. It’s been over 40 years for us to know each other. Why can’t I contact the Registrar, then the Registrar sends a slip to the accounts department to check that I can get my pension because I’m alive? Same for Vincent Alexander. For five consecutive months Alexander has been in the news between March and August. Why can’t he make a call to the Registrar for his pension to be checked?
Do you know that only seven categories of people can sign an AS pension form? Do you know that AS was born since 1963? The seven categories are – notary public; commissioner of oaths; medical practitioner; head, minister of religion, police superintendent and bank manager.
Vincent Alexander was the AS Registrar for 20 years and he never saw the need to get rid of that colonial relic even though I brought it to his attention. This is the same Alexander who is Guyana’s second-biggest admirer of Guyana’s first anti-colonial president – Forbes Burnham. Do you know that only those seven categories can sign the NIS pension return? To think that we have been an independent country since 1966.
This is a vivid example where something inexplicable has taken over the psyche of this nation and perhaps permanently destroyed its people. I always had a very warm relationship with Bernard De Santos even when he was Attorney General. One night at AS in 2008 we had a big row against which I made a painful accusation.
When AS was set up in 1963, the statues recognized the trade union but exempted the trade union from sending an academic to represent academic staff at the Appointments Committee. Only a clerk or typist could do that. I raised this insanity at a statutory Council meeting asking for it to be removed. Only Bernard opposed it saying that the university’s founders knew what they were doing. They did not and the Council changed that particular statue on the spot.
So after hundreds of years of being a country back, the NIS has rescued Guyana. He has discovered modern civilization. But we have to praise the NIS even though it is late. The NIS has introduced a simple, technological and modern way of presenting the pension return. You can now do that by video call. There are six cell numbers you can call, and the NIS person will see you, take your data and make the necessary input.
So who in Guyana doesn’t know Adam Harris? So Adam can make the video call and the bingo – his data is put into the system. It is up to AS now to do the same. Oddly enough, it was not AS that offered this modern facility. AS has as most Guyanese would know it has a faculty of technology and offers a degree in computer science.
Certainly more will come of this thinking, such as the one that NIS gave Guyana. The question is when? Don’t rely on the commercial banks to do it. And why? Because leadership is the problem in this country. This is where Dr. Irfaan Ali enters. He has 10 years to change this country for the better. I know from a brief conversation with him that he was not satisfied with the non-modern ways in which the commercial banks treat customers.
I am not sure that the banks, insurance companies and NBS will change the anachronistic way of doing business. They must be weighed down by the leadership of the country. I do not admire Burnham but there is no way that Burnham would have allowed commercial banks to ignore his government regulations.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)