Dear Editor,
I read your editorial in response to the reports regarding school bus services. You summed up what you consider should be taken in account, and which could possibly amount to those figures. I could not directly recover where your summation of what could jack up the prices of those bills, was mentioned. Should not all of this have been negotiated before the price per trip was determined, similar to that of a construction contract?
Those busses are not the property of government. I am content that again a question of public transportation is being brought forward.
It all comes back to what I continue to propagate. Public transportation should be in the hands of the public (government). Whatever has to be changed and regulated can be changed with a transition period to compensate whoever needs to be compensated. The schools do not change location so the infrastructure can be studied and the routes can be re-arranged and laid out to avoid those complicated trips, and possibly make the trips shorter.
Which brings me back to my suggestion to change government working hours and school hours from seven to three. In addition, I would like to suggest that random tests should be made on school bus drivers, because on several occasions, I have seen school bus drivers getting into their bus with open beer bottles in their hands, containing liquid. There is one male driver that I saw buy the beer, opened it and I saw him get into the bus. This was in the beginning of April this year.
I am aware that nobody wants anyone to touch their money, but it should be earned earnestly. Everybody must eat, because I firmly believe that any man who goes out there and works eight hours a day should not have to worry about where he is going to get a plate of food tomorrow. And just like I continue to say that I do not agree with the kind of salaries and compensation that the MP's and ministers are enjoying, I will say that everybody should have a liveable income, and not a certain part of the community, while the rest have to struggle to make ends meet.
If government continues to permit a certain set of citizens to get so much more than the rest, government should know what can be the consequences. I will not use the same words that were used about two weeks ago, but the writing is on the wall. We need more balanced wages and in a country with a population of 40 to 50 thousand on 16 square miles, it should not take accountants bureaus to be able to reckon who should get what.
A MAVO student with a simple bookkeeping should be able to administrate that after the government has adequately determined reasonable liveable salaries. The Labour Department has to do its work. Government has to stop juggling. And the same way kinks were ironed out of the school bus transportation's budget, the same way all of those other kinks could be ironed out, and we would see that way too much money is given to the wrong people.
Many of those school children, who have grown up, now say that that has always been the modus operandi of government. That is why none are condemning the next and the same people are being shuffled from one board of the government-owned companies to the other. I was told not to defend them when they get caught, because they never cared about the people, so the people should not care about them.
They are involved in public transportation, supermarkets, construction, gas companies and anything one can think about. Can we press upon them to at least start by regulating the public transportation, so that everybody could be served without being picked up, because one does not live in a more lucrative for the permit holders' area. Let them for once ignore ‘what's in it for me’ and do the right thing. Are they not being (over)paid to do so?
Let us continue to pray for them. There is a saying in Dutch which, translated into English is, "The pitcher which is thrown in the well too often, does come up broken at last" I think that so many discrepancies have been uncovered of late that it is time for the players to adhere to that saying.
Russell A. Simmons
