WHAT IS REALLY GOING ON IN GUYANA?

Nov 12, 2009 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

One Government Minister appeared on local television and announced that there was now a problem with housing: not that there was no housing being provided by the government; but rather that the provision of housing cannot keep pace with the demand.
There is something radically wrong if this proposition is being accepted. If indeed it is a case that housing demand is outstripping the ability of the government to provide house lots, then it confirms that there is a serious defect in the government’s housing programme and that this program is being exploited by persons as means of adding to their property wealth.
The government of Guyana has consistently boasted that it has so far distributed and regularized in excess of seventy thousand house lots.
If we assume that on average each one of these lots houses four persons, then it would mean that the government housing drive, inclusive of the regularization of squatting areas, would have provided homes for two hundred and eighty thousand persons.
There was already before the housing drive, a considerable housing stock in Guyana and therefore it is not a case whereby these new house lots were the beginning of housing in Guyana. They met a demand for housing which had risen during the freeze on housing development during the latter part of the PNC’s rule.
Guyana has a population of some 730,000 persons and therefore if new housing was provided for 280,000 persons through the government’s housing program, and if now we are still being told that the demand for house lots cannot keep pace with the supply, then it means only one thing: that persons who would have previously owned properties have benefitted from this programme on large scale.
This can be the only logical explanation for the consistent demand.
Yet interestingly, each day you travel around Guyana and learn of many young couples who complain of not obtaining a house lot. This further confirms that fact that house lots may have found themselves into the wrong hands.
The government, however, has failed so far to conduct a comprehensive audit of all of the housing schemes which have been developed and regularized since the PPP came to power to ascertain whether persons who previously owned house lots benefitted from allocations.
Perhaps this failure stems from the fear of what will be revealed in such an audit: that there has been widespread abuse of the government’s house lot programme.
Yet the government continues to boast about the success of its housing drive and about the billions that it will be spending soon to upgrade housing areas. Yet if you do the maths you will see that the money that will be spent is money that the homeowners have paid to the government for their lots.
If you examine the numbers that the government says it will spend in the next few years and you divide that by the number of homeowners who will benefit from that spending, you will find that the total spending is less than the aggregated costs of the house lots.
And now to add injury to insult, the government has announced the most amazing plan.
It has been announced that the government will establish a two-billion-dollar fund for persons such as single parents who have found it difficult to obtain loans from the bank, to build their homes. Now what sort of nonsense is this?
If the banks whose interest rates are cheap for persons borrowing below eight million dollars have deemed these persons as not qualifying for loans i.e. the commercial banks have concerns that these persons may not be in a position to service their mortgages, then how could the government take taxpayers’ money and lend it to these very persons.
What is this? A free for all? This is nonsense. If the persons are denied loans because of their inability to repay how are they going to repay the government the two billion dollars that will be lent?
And which financial institution is going to be entrusted with administering the two billion dollars. The New Building Society?
The opposition in this country needs to wake up and see what is going on. Sugar workers had to go on strike and all they have got so far is arbitration.
Yet two billion dollars is going to be given to persons who do not qualify for housing loans. Yet another brain- dead idea emerging out of a clueless government!

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