HOPE deferred maketh the heart sick, and there have been many sick hearts from the deferred hope of acquiring a house lot after years of being given the royal run-around by officers of the former housing ministry.
One young man, after his son was born in 2001, applied for a house lot to build a home for himself, spouse, son and stepdaughter. It is now 2015, and he still has not acquired a house lot.
Initially, he was promised a low-income house lot in the new Eccles housing scheme. When he went to pay for the land, he was told that all the lots had already been distributed, although he knew persons who were still acquiring house lots at that site through ‘friends’ in the system.
He works as a fabrication engineer, constructing dredges for mining firms, and is hardly ever in town; so, after running endlessly to the ministry whenever he is in town, he was eventually, almost a decade later, promised a half-a-million-dollar lot in Herstelling.
He only had $200,000 in savings, and the housing ministry refused it, saying they would only accept a quarter-million dollars for the initial payment. He borrowed the rest of the money from his sister and asked his mother, who was his Power-of-Attorney, to pay it the next day because it was already late in the day (he had spent almost all day trying to see the officious and very rude housing official), and he was due to fly to an interior location early the next morning.

The housing official rudely told the young man’s mother that the ministry does not enter into transactions with holders of Power-of-Attorney, even though this woman was a well-known public figure who was paying money where there could be no possible fraud.
The official had given the young man a date; the 16th of one month three months hence, to pay the money. He returned one day before, and went to pay the money on the 16th, whereby he was informed that the lot he had been assigned was re-allocated to someone else since the 13th during a one-stop-shop exercise.
He was informed that the only house lots available then were million-dollar lots. The young man had, on that occasion, an approximate $400,000 in his possession. Of course, they would not accept that amount; and although he could have borrowed the rest of the money, he gave up in frustration and disgust, because he recognised that until he had forked out a bribe, he would never acquire a house lot from the ministry.
Yes! Tens of thousands acquired Government house lots, but there are many more stories like that of the aforementioned young man. His son was a baby when he first applied for a house lot. This month, his son turned fourteen, and he still has not acquired one.
Minister Ronald Bulkan of the Ministry of Communities has said that his Ministry is in the process of expediting all applications for house lots in the wake of a recent land-grabbing exercise staged by disgruntled residents along the East Coast and East Bank Demerara.
In acknowledging that a recent short-lived land-grabbing exercise of State and privately-owned lands by some members of the public highlighted the urgent need for assisting citizens who are in dire need of land for housing, the Minister is responding to a dire need for many who have been sidelined by the system to own their own homes at affordable considerations.
His disclosure that an in-depth review of past applications is currently ongoing, with the intent that all applicants who qualify are given house lots to build their own homes, heralds the righting of wrongs, and addressing injustices done to many who were forestalled in accessing Government houselots.