THE face of poverty is relative and situational but, put into circumscribed context, Guyana is certainly not a poor country.

Our healthcare system is one of the best in the world; primary and most times even secondary healthcare are free of cost.

During a Cabinet Outreach to Berbice last year, President Bharrat Jagdeo reiterated his administration’s commitment to deliver optimum levels of quality healthcare to the Guyanese people, citing the many improvements to the health sector within a relatively short time span.

Many ordinary persons would have unnecessarily deteriorated into blindness, because a private operation on one eye with cataract costs in the vicinity of $200,000, except that Government has ensured that Guyana’s poor always had access to free medical and surgical interventions in health problems of every kind, and where there is need for treatment overseas, the Ministry of Health assists substantially in a variety of ways to enable the patient to access the requisite medical/surgical interventions.

However, despite the infusion of billions of dollars toward the improvement of the health sector, and expanded and efficient healthcare for Guyanese citizens, this falls short at the human factor, where healthcare delivery is often found very wanting by healthcare providers.

At each venue in the Corentyne that the President held meetings, residents complained bitterly about  service delivery at the Skeldon Hospital, where they said they were often refused treatment and only provided referrals to the New Amsterdam Hospital, and not even that in the nights, because the gate to the hospital  is often locked then, with no doctor ever on call during late hours.

A visibly angry President Jagdeo lashed out at his advisors, stating that the reports that he was receiving had been very positive, and that his impression was that all was going well.

He reiterated his commitment to ensure the efficacy of the national health system, and re-stated his intention to make everyone – at every level- accountable for their performance on the job, or they would be sent packing.

The President expressed his dissatisfaction with teachers abandoning their charges to pursue their own educational advancement, and he says that, while his Government encourages and facilitates the educational and career mobility of the teaching fraternity, this should not happen through compromising the quality of education they provide for the nation’s young people.

Nowhere in the world are teachers allowed to educate themselves at the nation’s expense.  They have to do so on their own time, using their own resources.  Teachers in Guyana have extended free time in the afternoons and during school holidays.
Another bugbear is the refusal of teachers to complete the national curriculum within the prescribed schools timetables, preferring to teach desultorily and tardily during school hours, then providing the requisite tutelage during “extra lessons”.

As in the case of hospital administrators, the President said that headteachers would now be under greater scrutiny for the quality of their supervision within their respective educational institutions.

Guyana’s President is adamant that every Guyanese child, irrespective of background, should have equal opportunities for advancement in the pathway of their lives.

To this end, the President announced an expanded Uniform Assistance Programme, which was given its first budgetary allocation of $31 million in 2002, after a presidential outreach when he realized that many children were being kept out of school because their parents could not afford uniforms.

He said that every child in the country would be provided a minimum of one uniform each.  He also guaranteed that children would be provided one nutritive meal every day, even if it is nutrition/vitamin-fortified milk and snacks, stating that hinterland children were already being provided one hot meal each day.  This programme has since then been initiated in most schools, with a great degree of success.

The President decried the lack of access to IT facilities of Guyana’s poor children, and promised that, in the short period remaining of his stewardship of the nation, he will attempt to ensure that every Guyanese home is provided access to modern IT equipment, which will help both children and adults in their various pursuits – especially in educational and information-acquisition areas.  This was the genesis of the One Laptop Per Family initiative.
Addressing the concern of residents over the drug-usage and related problems of the youths, the President said that once anyone begins to use drugs,  the entire community suffers and degrades, because to feed the habit the user begins to steal from their own homes, then from the homes of others.  Substance abuse also precipitates violent behaviour by the user; hence, much of the violence plaguing communities, even at school level.
He instructed the Commander of the Berbice branch of the Police Force, Asst. Commissioner Steve Merai, to start a campaign intended to eliminate the scourge of drugs from communities.  This call has either not been heeded, or has not yet begun to impact on the society as yet, because anti-social behaviour in the society is escalating.
While awaiting the President’s emergence from a private meeting, one resident related to the Chronicle that some policemen from the Police Outpost at Rose Hall ignore drug-related incidents right in the vicinity of their operations, because they are treated very well by the pushers.
This scourge proliferates in the youthful communities of our country and the fallout is being progressively felt through the escalation of violence in schools and at school-related activities, as well as incidents of theft, sometimes under arms, by bands of young men (and often women).
In his charge to Merai to address the situation condignly, the President noted the need for communities to cooperate in efforts to guide their children in constructive endeavours, and to ensure that the systems that the Government put in place work, as in the Youth Choice programmes, where at one location computers are still left in their plastic casings.
President Jagdeo said that most of the issues have to do with the proper functioning of systems and the efficient implementation of programmes.
And yes, the face of poverty is relative and situational. In the great USA, a compassionate and humane President Obama, whose intent on changing the equation in that nation’s health sector to benefit the poor, got a fight worse than that preceding general elections in that country.
And which US President has ever instituted feeding programmes in public schools for the nation’s poor children?  This, in a nation that spends  zillions on its war machinery.
So who can define Guyana as a poor country when its people are being looked after in the vital ways that matter by its governmental construct?  Only those who devise strategies to undermine and derail Government’s developmental programmes and initiatives that are created to help and empower the Guyanese people and lead this nation to the pathways of prosperity.