Dear Editor,
PLEASE permit me space in your letters column to highlight the callousness and cruelty that is being meted out to retirees of the Mayor and Councillors of the City of Georgetown.
Employees who have retired from the services of the Council over the last three years, by and large, have been denied their gratuity payments. In fact, it is only a very few, like one former employee of the personnel section who had been paid the gratuity and this is only because that person is a friend of those in charge.

The other few that have been paid have only received one-half of what is due and this merely happened because they took the matter and the council to court; the Local Government Commission, and also the Ministry of Communities. The rest of retirees are left, as they say in Guyana, ‘to suck bricks’.

The retirees, many of whom have served the council and city of Georgetown for most of their working lives, with the majority working there for well over thirty years, are made to feel as though they are begging alms when they go to receive their pensions. They are paid when and how the administration of the Council pleases, having to visit their banks or City Hall multiple times and are told that they have to wait until after the current employees receive their delayed salaries, before they can be considered. And whenever they attempt to complain of the inconvenience this is causing them, many of whom have become physically challenged; they are impolitely told that they have to wait until those who are currently working and producing are paid first.

I would like to know whether the administration of the council realises that when these elderly former employees whom they are maltreating worked with the council, that Georgetown was a clean, pristine ‘Garden City’; that its accounts were properly managed and audited each year; that the City Hall building was not on the verge of collapse; that the clocks at the various markets worked; that there were no pigs being reared at the cemetery; that there were no contractors carting off tens of millions of dollars each month; that the roads, bridges and streetlights were properly maintained; that there were hardly any robberies committed around the markets; that the abattoir was fully functional and produced wholesome beef and pork for consumers; that the city hadn’t a fraction of the mosquitoes, rats and other rodents; that the constabulary ranks did not shoot unarmed and mentally challenged prisoners, and that the city’s building codes were fully respected.
I would like to call on the Ministry of Social Protection to look into the plight of the pensioners of the Georgetown City Council.

Regards
Jermaine Johnson