In his New Year’s message, the President appealed to the obligation of the Guyanese people to work towards the common good.

Currently, there is an issue at the Georgetown Post Office Corporation (GPOC) where some employees caught stealing large sums of monies from their employer are still on the job.

It has been reported that they will be making restitution with regards to the stolen money.

Several years ago Ms Sita Ramlall sacked some employees at the Registry because of theft of millions of dollars. This is a story that is repeated throughout the various branches of the public sector.

The political opposition parties witch-hunted Ms. Ramlall for years, until PNC Chairman Winston Murray was appointed Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee; then, during the examination of successive Auditor’s General Reports, when members of the opposition witnessed for themselves the magnitude of the corruption and stealing endemic within most Public Service departments, thefts for which records have been repeated year after year in the AG’s Reports because the perpetrators are either out of the jurisdiction; and even for those who are still working (and continuing to steal) are proven untouchable by the system, they reversed their attitude and pursued the recovery of the State’s assets with diligence.

But then they discovered for themselves that it is practically impossible to recover stolen State assets and to take punitive measures against State employees who have been caught stealing or in breach of professional conduct.

This may be the only country in the world where Public Servants behave as though they are a law unto themselves, not accountable to anyone for lax work ethics, and they are allowed to get away with it. They are rightfully the target of many satirical skits.

The painful fact is that their customary rudeness, discourtesy, disrespect, unprofessionalism, and lack of care and the lax provision of services to the public is most often not addressed by any concerned body, except in an ad hoc manner.

The average worker is heavily-taxed, with their monies going toward wage and benefits packets for Public Servants, yet the average Public Servant that interfaces with the public often provides much less than efficient service to members of the public, with an arrogant disdain that cuts across every divide.

Today, and even while the President was appealing for Guyanese to work towards the common good, two families are in mourning over their wives, daughters, and mothers who died in childbirth.

The horror stories they relate about the treatment by nurses to the women before they died in excruciating agony – and probably unnecessarily, have been repeated time and again over the years – and the victims span every divide in the land.

The President has called for an inquest into the death of Minister Desrey Fox, because he considers it baffling how anyone could transit from a state of a few minor injuries to being dead within a matter of hours.

One patient, who was practically crippled in an accident, was pelted with a plastic bottle by a nurse after he continued asking for a bedpan despite being ignored for hours.

Most times there is no redress for the victims. Nurses and other healthcare providers who are employed in the Public Service work at private institutions, then they catch up on their rest when they have to serve patients at public institutions, so untrained relatives have to provide most of the care for which nurses are paid in a profession where the benefits outweigh the salary.

Instead of being taken to task they seem to be protected from behind a white wall of silence.

The mavericks in the security sector have caused so much anguish to so many, but more to the image of the respective organizations through which they are mandated to serve the public.

The teachers, who have no vocation, nor integrity to work in a committed way to educate their charges, are not only impeding the targets set for the education sector, but they are aborting and destroying the future of the students whom they fail to teach in a professional manner.

The Government can provide the infrastructures and the facilitating mechanisms, but unless the human equation does not factor in to provide the necessary and relevant service, then systems are bound to fail.

And who suffers?

Everyone in the nation does; so it is incumbent on all the stakeholders of the nation’s resources to be vigilant and ensure that those whom are mandated to serve the nation work with commitment in pursuit of “the common good”.