Recognise PHIs invaluable contribution

The outstanding issue that the country’s Public Health Inspectors (PHIs) are clamouring for betrays the fact that, even this Government, like all Governments pledging a clean administration, can fall before the altar of parochial politics.

The PHIs are not demanding higher salaries like most trade unions do. They are not like Government doctors or nurses, Railway engine drivers and estate workers who strike merely when the iron is hot to paralyse ordinary life, or the economy. Maybe they don’t have the muscle to do that. The country may not fall apart without the PHIs, or some might think so.

Yet, theirs has been a yeoman service ever since they were formed in colonial times, way back in 1913, when they were known as Sanitary Inspectors. It was in 1954 they were termed Public Health Inspectors.

Like other professions or vocations, starting from the politicians, there are the ‘rotten mangoes’ among them, but when one reads the newspapers these days and finds that some men of even the elite Special Task Force (STF) have been involved in providing security to suspects involved in the narcotics trade, it shows the extent to which bribery and corruption in this country has permeated every sphere. The Solicitor General has told court that narcotics seized by the STF were then recycled back to the narcotics mafia which included officers of the Police Narcotics Bureau.

Successive Governments have been full of platitudes about fighting the narco business, yet when a former Prime Minister’s office itself got entangled in a narcotics import scandal not so long ago, everything was done to hush it up and close the file. Is it any surprise then what the Police have been up to when this is the example the political leadership of this country has shown all along.

The PHIs whose duties run the gamut from control of communicable and non-communicable diseases, to waste disposal, rabies control and school health safety work have been the frontline preventive force in the COVID-19 battle, being heavily involved in contact tracing, identifying possible areas of infection and also placing people in quarantine and checking on those in home quarantine. Theirs has been an invaluable contribution.