WHAT A COUNTRY WE LIVE IN!
If you did not cry when you viewed the screening of that Indian movie classic Dosti, then you must have a heart of stone. If you did not cry when looking at John Voigt play The Champ, then you have a strong constitution for emotional roller coasters.
But if you did not cry when you look at those employees from GINA who are about to join the unemployed ranks, then you do not have a heart.
It is very sad to see what has happened to those poor employees of GINA, most of whom are young people trying to make a life in this country that is so wracked with divisions that it is difficult for some people to come out and say that what was done to these workers was wrong, dead wrong!
How can APNU claim that it was not its intention to put ordinary workers out of work when it voted down the subvention for GINA? That agency is a subvention agency. It does not earn its own revenues. So when you vote a mere $1 for that body what are you saying to them?
You cannot be saying to them you need them to reform. Reform with $1? A vote of $1 for a subvention agency is a vote to close down the agency and this is what now faces the employees of GINA.
What reform can one speak about in GINA? Reforming government propaganda? The job of GINA is propaganda. Its job is to churn out the government side of issues and the government side alone. This is what was also done under the PNC when there was the Government Information Service and its successor the Guyana Public Communications Agency which was headed by someone who is now a media consultant. No one decided then that the government propaganda agencies should not be funded in the budget.
Every government is entitled to have a unit to promote its public relations. These are usually called government information agencies.
No one has to agree with what the government says. But those who respect free speech will argue that while they may not agree with those with whom they differ, they will defend to the death those persons’ right to communicate their opinions.
So can the opposition be defending the right of the government to express its opinion when they are demanding reform by effectively shutting the very agency that disseminates information for the government down?
What is even sadder is the silence, the lack of response by the wider society. What is dismaying is the fact that the only media grouping which has so far come forward to condemn this travesty has been the newly formed Independent Media Workers Association which many feel is not so independent.
The Guyana Press Association is yet to break a whisper. Kaieteur News which is so keen on running front page comments whenever freedom of the press is under threat has been silent on the treatment to these workers, as has been the Stabroek News.
What a society we live in that the political polarization allows persons to laugh at the misery and ill-fate of others! What a society we live in that persons could lose their jobs so easily and so unfairly and there is little support coming their way!
If the outcome was not so tragic, if it did not involve displacing young professionals into the ranks of the unemployed in a country in which the opposition says that jobs are hard to come by for young people, then the excuse by the opposition that it did not intend to put ordinary workers on the bread line would have been a comedy. But there is nothing to laugh about what has happened in GINA. And if there is any joke then it has to be on those who have robbed these young people of the source of their bread and butter.
To add insult to injury, we are told that the opposition feels that it has no reason to apologize. It does not. The issue is not about apologizing. Saying sorry is not going to give back these workers their jobs. It is not going to assuage the hurt that they feel at what their country’s leaders have done to them. This injustice that was meted out to them was not done by some private sector boss or even by their own government superiors. It was done to them by the very persons whom they elected to oversee their interests in the parliament.
An apology is not the issue. The issue is shame. Did those who voted that $1 for GINA have no shame? Are they not ashamed at what they have done to other people’s children?
