Dear Editor,
I WOULD like to throw my support behind the Town Clerk of Georgetown with regard to his suggestion to retrench workers from the top heavy, overstaffed, underutilized and poorly equipped municipal workforce. As the old people would say, ‘You should never hang your hat where your hand can’t reach’.

He should begin by disposing with the Public Relations Section from whence he came, as it serves no meaningful purpose in the realities of today’s Georgetown. The citizens of our capital are not interested in spin doctoring, in the dissemination of propaganda and in their feeble attempts to sugarcoat the failings, the ineptitude and inabilities of the Council. Instead of facilitating regular town hall-styled meetings, maintaining a healthy online municipal presence, producing newspapers/newsletters and seeking to have their own city radio/television stations, the staff of that section can instead be seen idling all day long, taking selfies and just goofing off.

He should then move to dismantle and discard the Internal Audit section, a division just like the PR section that is costing the citizenry millions of dollars each month, with nothing worthwhile to show for it. The municipality’s financial and accounting systems are the most duplicitous ever, which have not been audited or qualified in decades. Financial regulations are broken on a daily basis, yet the members of the Internal Audit section are completely unconcerned, if not happy, with the way things are there.

Why does the Council need a Cemetery Section with gangs of workers in place, when these workers are never allowed to maintain the cemetery on a regular basis, but what is allowed at the cemetery instead is that it is allowed to flourish into a rainforest jungle, with periodic clean-up campaigns that are effected by private contractors who are granted these jobs without any competitive bidding process, but which cost the citizens hundreds of millions of dollars.

He should then turn his attention to reverting the big fancy Human Resource Department to the more modest Personnel Section it once was. The gratuitous upgrade of this section is merely costing the city millions of dollars more each month with the instituting of several new and elaborate positions, but which has achieved nothing more than to facilitate and maintain the nepotism, cronyism and favouritism within the Council. This bungling department, it should be noted, oversees the non-payments of deductions to GRA, NIS, etc. and remains as inept as it were when it had been just a little section.

The Warden section that was recently set up needs to be immediately taken to pieces. This section that is costing the Council millions upon millions is stuffed with ‘friends and family’ who have nothing to do but skylark all day, with some even going home and taking a siesta during the day. Last, but certainly not least, he should retrench himself and his many assistants who are blameworthy for the total destruction of the financial viability, proper accounting systems and the good governance within the Council within the last three years.
Regards
Sambu Jacobus