TIME and again President Jagdeo has reiterated that protecting Guyana’s children should be paramount to any other consideration, and their welfare should be the barometer to gauge effects of empowerment and protective community initiatives that government facilitates countrywide.
Yet, despite protective legislation and an abundance of funding to child protection bodies and ancillary services, including institutions run by NGOs, Guyana’s children are falling through the cracks.
Neesa Gopaul and her little sister, Miriam, are cases in point. Despite the fact that her maternal relatives sent both children back to an abusive situation, claiming $8,000 per week was not enough to support them, which indirectly led to Neesa’s murder, they still have custody of six-year-old Miriam – to whom they are now clinging, mainly because she is now the sole heir of her father’s extensive property, despite frantic efforts, in and out of the courts by her wealthy paternal relatives to obtain custody of the child. Yet nobody in authority seems to care about the child.
A mother who had contracted aids from her husband in Mahaica tried valiantly to provide her children with a normal life and education, but society and the authorities were unconcerned at her plight and today she is dead, when she could have been saved with a little collective caring. Her children are scattered to the winds and again no-one seems to care.
President Jagdeo had given instructions that the children of the sugar workers who had been kidnapped and murdered aback Buxton should receive financial assistance from the state until they reach 18 years of age because, in the absence of their bodies, which were never found, the mothers could not receive their NIS or other benefits from their employers, yet the children either never received any financial help or the help was cut off within a short time.
Many times the mothers call the editors of Chronicle in tears, begging intercession so that they can receive help for their children. Whatever was their due from the state should be given in an accrual sum so that they could either invest in a wealth-creational venture because their education (some of them) was curtailed because of lack of affordability on their mother’s part.
It is also seven years since their fathers disappeared and it is time for NIS to take stock and ensure the children receive their fathers’ benefits and pensions, retroactive to the day they disappeared, when they were presumed dead.
A teenager had been encouraged into thievery and other illegal activities by his grandfather and uncles and he was caught twice in the act – once at Parika and recently at Mahaica. Both times he was severely beaten and publicly defamed, when the real culprits are his older relatives, who are guilty of child abuse in one of its worse forms, because they have robbed this child of his values, his integrity, an academic education, and pointed him into a future of criminality.
But what did the authorities do when he was first caught – zilch, nothing, nada! The fact that he was left with those relatives (who should by now be in jail) is an indication of the failure of the authorities to protect the juveniles in society; because every child lost is one child too many.
A seventeen-year-old girl from Linden related a horrifying tale of years of rape and sexual abuse at the hands of her brother and father – the persons who should have protected her, but who instead looted her innocence and her future. The culprits have been set free to intimidate the victim into retracting her statement.
The PPP/C administration continues to contribute substantially toward social and economic development in the face of numerous challenges.
President Bharrat Jagdeo has on several occasions reiterated his Government’s position and commitment to the reduction of poverty and to improve the functionality of social safety net programmes to ensure that the Nation’s most vulnerable are protected and provided for. To enable this billions of dollars are allocated annually in the National Budget for the execution of requisite programmes and projects.
In keeping with the administration’s goal of ensuring premium social services, many units of the Ministry of Labour, Human Services and Social Security have been established to ensure that the needs of vulnerable groups of Guyanese are met.
However, the safety nets that the Government have casted seem to have holes, and it is time for a drastic investigation to determine who are the moles undermining the Administration’s unyielding commitment to catch and offer the vulnerable in society protection;  and to ensure the protective mechanisms devised work to optimum capacity, especially toward ensuring that Guyana’s children are protected from abusers and molesters, and that the perpetrators are punished so severely that they, and others of their ilk, should think twice before they commit any such acts again.