We are wasting money

Jul 19, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column

By Adam Harris
There is a saying that willful waste makes woeful want and Guyana seems to be willfully wasting money in so many areas. There has been a multi-million-dollar expenditure on D’Urban Park. The plan was to develop that area into a recreation facility and the nation, particularly the sports-loving Guyanese were over the roof.
At last we were going to get something that would propel our sportsmen to levels already reached by our colleagues in the Caribbean. Jamaica recognized that it needed to do something for its athletes. The Jamaican Government built a sports stadium, which was as good as any in the world.
The country already had athletes who were among the best in the world and all the country needed was a facility to help the others along. Today there is the sensation Usain Bolt; there is Asafa Powell, the women, and of course just yesterday, the country unearthed another—a young man who is already so fast that he may be the fastest junior in the world.

So indeed we were happy that at last we were going to get something to help our sportsmen along. I could not realize that we were merely laying the foundation for a jungle. We pumped millions of dollars of sand on the D’Urban Park Square and then we allowed the jungle to emerge.
We could have allowed the jungle to emerge without the expenditure but we had money to waste and we did. The architects may say that they created employment for some Guyanese.
Then we recognized that as the Land of Many Waters, there was no need for us to languish in swimming. We had swimmers who were relatively good in the region and so we thought that we could push them a step further by setting up an Olympic-sized swimming pool.
I was excited because I had heard that our swimmers in the short pool were at a disadvantage when they entered the longer pool. The speed might have been there but the timing to the turn placed them at a disadvantage.

Again, I never realized that we would have been wasting money. We put $200 million up to a contractor and immediately the heavy equipment went on the site to excavate the area for this pool.
Today, nearly four years later there is no pool; the millions have disappeared and I regret that some Guyanese did not even benefit from this expenditure.
We have poured money into other projects that failed to get started and it is as if we have money to burn. I suspect that we have these grandiose plans and with the funds at our disposal we attack the proposal with gusto. Then we get stalled and before long the project is forgotten.
Someone once said that Guyana is a seven-day wonder; that people would latch onto an idea and after seven days we forget it to move on to another. Why has the swimming pool not become a reality? I would suppose that it had to do with the fact that the administration barely hangs on to something for too long because there is so much to be done.

There is something else. A friend of mine is paying close attention to the contracts being awarded because he is convinced that there are a lot of leaks and that money ends up in somebody’s pocket.
When I discussed the swimming pool with him, he immediately said that he was certain that the idea was to find a way to get money into somebody’s pocket. I am still trying to convince him otherwise but I am not doing a good job.
I remembered the time when the now dead Ed Hartley made a move to have a synthetic athletic track installed in Guyana. We had already spent millions of dollars on what used to be the Guyana Sports Club for this athletic stadium.

Somebody in his wisdom said that Guyana did not need the track. To this day our athletes are running on grass with the result that their times are so substandard that we must rely on the foreign athletes to bring us glory although we have good people here.
I have asked some people to go after the architects of the failed projects because to my mind there is need for these things, not least among them the Olympic pool.
I still want to see a synthetic track and I know that as technology advances there are clubs and countries that are lifting older tracks and doing nothing but dumping them. With our diplomats abroad I am sure that they can approach some of these clubs or agencies for the tracks.
We import used tyres, why can’t we import used athletic tracks?

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