Peeping Tom...Freddie needs to be fairer and more objective

Peeping Tom…Freddie needs to be fairer and more objective

Aug 18, 2008 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Freddie remains one of Guyana’s most read columnists.
However, the bitterness that he harbours towards certain leaders of the PPP seems to be diminishing his analysis, which over the past few months has become discredited, and in the process, Freddie has come to discredit himself.

I believe that he would try to deal with the issues, rather than use the issues as the basis for venting his venom on the leaders of the PPP — leaders with whom he once saw eye-to-eye, so much so that he actually worked as one of the PPP propagandists at one time, by hosting a program on State-owned television.
It was not his independence of thought that caused him to be dumped.

On the contrary, he was trying to promote one of his friends at the cost of embarrassing the then Minister of Health. His conduct was clearly opportunistic and unethical, and he was rightly fired.

He has ever since harboured a great deal of bitterness over those whom he felt were responsible or did not go against that decision, and this is one of the reasons why he is so obsessed with criticizing the Government, albeit at times without a pretence of fairness.

On Friday last, he continued his assault on the PPP by signalling for comment criticisms that former President of Guyana Mrs. Janet Jagan made in her column in the August 8-10 edition of the Mirror newspaper.

Most of what he said has some merit. Like him, I, too, believe that Guyana has cultivated a mendicant attitude towards national development, and should not have had to go begging to the IDB for a mere US$3 M to pay for a training program for young people.

Guyana will be spending far more than US$3M on the hosting of CARIFESTA, and with the windfall from the VAT, we can surely afford to fund such a training program.

Of course, it would have been more visionary if the Government, instead of having to go begging, could have simply reconceptualised the project and allowed NGO’s to raise both the financing and to execute the training.

This would have ensured greater local ownership of the training, and would have enhanced the Government’s relationship with civil society, while freeing the State to concentrate on more important matters.

This is the sort of perspective that one expected Freddie would have offered, rather than simply once again seeking to pick on those who had simply rejected the fact that the IDB was attaching unreasonable strings before agreeing to fund the program.

Of course, the criticisms made against the IDB can be made against the entire donor financing community, and one expected that Freddie would have offered a more scholarly critique on the incestuous and inherent relationship between donor funding and the extensive utilization of that funding for foreign consultants.

It is now inevitable that, even if a Government carries out a detailed study and analysis of a project, before such a project receives funding, the funding agency would demand a consultant be employed — paid and most likely approved by the funding agency — to carry out a feasibility study of the project.

Developmental assistance programs, in fact, are ones that create a consultant industry. The two go hand in hand. A great deal of resources of any project loan goes towards paying foreign consultants. This has been so even before the PPP got into office.

This column has been highly critical of the two-billion-dollar LEAP program that we were told would transform Linden.

This column had predicted that by the time this program ended, Linden would not be much better off; and instead of having so much money go into the hands of both foreign and local consultants, the solution to the problems of Linden has more to with reviving the bauxite industry than anything that this two-billion-dollar project will achieve.

There are PPP leaders who have the historical memory to understand the role that funding agencies play in creating dependency and in facilitating the shift towards market economies.

It is commendable that these leaders are now speaking out against such programs. It is an important development that, despite their Government having become enmeshed in donor programs which have not “strings” but “ropes” attached, they should now be speaking out.

Kissoon may have had a point if he had claimed that greater dissent on these programs should have been long in coming.

But he certainly ought to have been more objective and to have given credit to the validity of the argument that these funding agencies continue with old attitudes towards Third World countries.