A nation going nowhere

Dec 20, 2009 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

Last Sunday, I reported on the break-in of my car outside the Eve Leary office of the Tactical Services Unit of the police force outside the bandstand of the seawall. What I failed to mention was that that particular area from the Pegasus to Camp Road where the CID Head Office is, has no street lights even though there are street lamps. In fact, I had parked right under a lamp. It wasn’t working of course. It is unimaginable that this particular pathway could be unlighted.
First, this is a place where a large number of foreign visitors pass when they use the Pegasus Hotel. What do they think of Guyana that right outside one of the premier international hotels, there is a long passage of darkness? Equally nauseating is that right outside the heart of the Eve Leary police compound is a road where there are no street lights. In which country, can you find a police head office located in a set of streets where for decades there are no workable lamps?
It makes you sick when you read how this Government spends money. Words like indecent, perverted, sickening just aren’t too harsh. This Government spends hundreds of millions of dollars yearly on absolute waste.
We will come to what Christopher Ram discovered but first; I was at the Archer’s Old Home to see the police band entertain the sick and elderly at that institution. The Police Band is in need of much more instruments. I would classify the outfit as a trumpet band. The Barbadian Police Band is a far more outfitted orchestra. You just name it, once it lies in the realm of the public sector, it needs modernizing.
Let’s return to Christopher Ram. The accountant explains that contract employees with the Government earn $3.2 billion yearly and this excludes benefits which will run into hundreds of millions. Yet this country is going nowhere. What do these people do? We should have been way ahead of other Caribbean countries with those kinds of “experts” earning so much money.
Ram went on to show us that the Office of the President employs 201 persons, of which 95 are consultants. Why with this kind of power-house do we remain one of the poorest countries in the world, begging Norway for money in exchange for reduced sovereignty?
Three years ago, I did a little telephonic research, the results of which I published in bits and pieces. I spent one hour every morning telephoning this power-house – the hundreds of top level-employees this country has, including Ministers and semi-autonomous bodies like GPL, UG, Forestry Commission etc. You are not going to believe this. For one entire week, I was unable to get hold of at least one of them. All had secretaries, and all of them told me these people were at meetings.
So The Office of the President has 95 consultants, the Guyana Government per capita has one of the largest, if not the largest (per capita) Cabinet among countries of the world, the Treasury spends about four billion yearly on them, but they are never in office and when they are, they are at meetings. The abominable feature of this scenario, is that as a country we are not going anywhere despite this wealth of skills.
Read the Memorandum between Norway and Guyana to see what Norway did to our sovereignty. All this talk about rejecting the UK’s help in police reform because Guyana’s sovereignty was jeopardized is elephant dung. If you want to see how Guyana has been reduced to a little banana republic (not that it is any way above such a type of country) then read that covenant.
Despite the talk about getting US$50M each year for five years, the little dictators are hiding the fact that there is a cornucopia of restraints, demands and oversights before the funds can be released. And the money is kept in the custody of an international body over which the Guyana Government has no legal or actual control.
They can use the Lotto funds as they like but they have no control of the money that the Government of Guyana earns from offering carbon credits through forest preservation. It is Guyana’s property. Guyana is using its resources to help the world, yet the money we earn from that has to be held in an international account and cannot be spent as the Government would like.
The Memorandum between Norway and Guyana shows just how corrupt the world thinks the present regime is. But more than this, that agreement shows how these people ended up as fools and pawns. They are too embarrassed to admit it.

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