2 days Ago By Thilina Walpola
We Ordinaries of this wonderful island are living in anticipation and hope. Is it for a good time in the festive season; some merrymaking; and perchance a visit from ‘Ho Ho Man’. No, our hope lives not on these ephemeral benefits.
Rather are we winning our hopes for an improvement the way the country is run and the deal we get as citizens. It is wonderful to hope after so very many years of despair with government mismanagement and rife corruption. We have confidence in our new government, entirely opposite to those which preceded it.
Need for outside carers in hospitals Cass had been mulling over the allocation of jobs in hospital wards since a person she knows is having immense problems organising carers – day and night – for his mother-in-law in a Colombo suburban hospital. Family members are hard pressed to be with the patient and to hire an attendant means Rs. 4,000 per session.
This is what pertains in government hospitals. Cass cannot generalise but she knows this is the practice: carers brought in by the patient’s family to see to all the patient’s needs –washing, toileting et al. About 15 years ago Cass was in the Castle Street Hospital for Women.
Doctors were excellent but the nurses and the few scattered attendants spent most of their time chatting and munching and watching TV. This is first hand reporting of how things stood so long ago too. On the day of surgery, the nursing sister in charge announced that each patient undergoing surgery had to have a carer for the night.
Mercifully, cell phones were available. That night Cass’ niece who stayed with her, attended to seven other patients, their carers were fast asleep! Why can’t nurses and attendants do their work of nursing and attending to patients? Why have outsiders to be brought in to care for patients when the hospital pays so many nurses in each ward and attendants to care for the sick? Nurses in our government hospitals will never touch a bedpan whereas in Britain they do all patient related work from the most menial to the administration of injections, etc. They rarely have time for even short breaks.
Patients are hospitalised because caring for them is not possible in homes. Thus, hospitals must take full charge of patients and have them cared for by trained staff. We do hope the Health Minister will direct his attention to this severe lapse on the part of hospital staff.
Gautam Adani exposed It has been reported that the US prosecutors have charged Indian billionaire Adani and seven others in an alleged bribery and fraud scheme related to a renewable energy project in India. In the indictment, prosecutors alleged the tycoon and other senior executives had agreed to the payments to Indian officials to win contracts for his renewable energy company, expected to yield more than $2 bn in profits over 20 years. The authorities have said Adani and the other defendants agreed to pay about $265 m in bribes to Indian officials to obtain contracts.
Cass cannot expand on that. What she pounced on was that this Indian company allegedly bribed officials to accept his proposals for installing renewable energy systems. Cass had, like so many others, got suspicious bristling ever since Adani appeared on the local scene with proposals for port development and particularly the Mannar Wind Power Project, phase two.
Why the insistence on this project and Adani as supplier in the face of mass protests by local environmentalists against the installation of wind turbines in Mannar posing a hazard to migratory birds and the prized eco-system in that area. The certainty of bribes, corruption and selling of Sri Lanka’s assets for personal gain of some, was firm in mind then. Have Sri Lankans also been bribed? We also realise we Ordinaries were not mistaken in our suspicion of this entrepreneur.
We will, eventually, get to know which political VIPs in the two previous governments willingly sold our land with assists for a mere green back pottage slipped into their capacious pockets. Employment in Korea After a while, placard-bearing protestors were seen this week near the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). They were protesting the SLBFE’s move against E-8 visas for employment in South Korea.
The SLBFE Chairperson announced the E-8 visa agreement was signed unlawfully by the former subject Minister, without obtaining Cabinet approval or proper government authorisation. The Bureau facilitates the issuance of of E-9 visas, which guarantee employment in South Korea for four years 10 months while the E-8 visa is for much shorter periods of employment. No private employment agencies are permitted to send workers to South Korea under the E-8 visa system, nor to collect any associated fees.
So what rears its Medusa head? Corruption – so rampant in the recent past, so very vile. People know the name of a VIP who gained from this business of employment in Korea, where each person sent to Korea had to remit a good amount to the collectors of illicit lucre here. If that isn’t selling and living luxuriously on the blood, sweat and tears of the desperate, what is? But now we need not shake our heads and say resigned – What to do, Aney? We no long need to ask that rhetorical question.
It is going to be literal. Something will be done. The day of retribution will come to these blood suckers; they will have to pay for their crimes against humanity.
P. S. Bigger hauls of hidden drugs have been made in the very recent past than during the much touted Yukthiya programme duration of the last government.
Whispered among us was the question –was it another ruse to collect bribes? Cass sure felt sprats were caught while the drug sharks were not apprehended. Did they line insatiable pockets – pockets which even ordinary Cassandra knew were in the scheme – advertised to rid the country of the drug menace. Was even a dent made by the Yukthiya Programme?.
