The Alexei Ramotar saga – paper qualifications do not equate to competence, skill or managerial ability

Jan 22, 2014 Letters

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Dear Editor,
Finance Minister Ashni Singh went on the warpath recently defending President Ramotar son’s (Alexei Ramotar) shoddily incompetent administration, management and delivery of a US $32 million project to bring a fibre optic cable from Brazil to Guyana. It is no surprise that old ethnic supremacist and intellectual fraudster Vishnu Bisram of the PPP could win up to 60% of the votes in the 2011 election fame echoed Ashni Singh’s misguided and obtuse statements.
The Opposition’s criticism of the soporific pace and abysmal performance of this project and its manager, Alexei Ramotar, has nothing to do with Alexei Ramotar’s qualifications or him being President Ramotar’s son, although most Guyanese must think the incompetence and inaction is now genetic. It has nothing to do with limited talent or a paucity of human resources in Guyana or a brain drain.
These are all red herrings thrown in by con artists like Ashni Singh and their ethnic triumphalist friends like Bisram to detract from the real issue here – Alexei Ramotar failed and continues to fail and it is costing the people of Guyana who dutifully pay their taxes a lot of money. It does not matter how many degrees Alexei Ramotar holds. What this is really about is incompetence and failure and the pathetic attempts to excuse failure and incompetence under all manner of ludicrous guises.
In fact, this fiasco magnifies Alexei Ramotar’s failure and mismanagement because of the same supposedly eminent qualifications he holds. Let us not forget that a man with a Masters in Computer Sciences from a Canadian university has failed at the simple task of stringing a cable from Brazil to Guyana when GT&T engineers, some of whom are not as qualified on paper, have successfully brought a cable across an ocean to Guyana in addition to running hundreds of miles of cables across Guyana.
This is the real problem here. Computer engineers with lesser qualifications right here in Guyana have done more than Alexei Ramotar and the Opposition is right to ask serious questions, for this is taxpayers’ money going down the drain. So, brandishing Alexei Ramotar’s qualifications will only serve to emphasize the depth and shockingness of his deficiencies in handling this project. Now we know he did not fail for lack of qualifications but for lack of managerial acumen, skill, expertise and ability to just get it done.
Qualification is not competence. Ashni Singh with his doctorate in finance has failed to radically transform Guyana’s economy under his helm as Finance Minister. We are a country burdened with high debt, narco and black-market economy, rising exchange rates, growing inflation, gross inequality, oligarchic domination of resources, runaway corruption, failed systems, dismal accountability, a non-functioning stock exchange, a pathetic investment banking sector, catastrophic waste, theft and mis-spending of taxpayers’ money under Dr. Ashni Singh and Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo in spite of their training in economics and finance and their other eminent qualifications.
The Guyana economy performed better under Desmond Hoyte the lawyer (after reforms in 1990) and Cheddi Jagan the dentist, two men without any Masters degrees and without any formal training in Economics, than under the stewardship of Ashni Singh and Bharrat Jagdeo with all their post-graduate qualifications. Dr Leslie Ramsammy, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, Dr. Ashni Singh and Robert Persaud, MBA all presided over the collapse of the sugar industry with the final nail in the coffin coming in 2016 when the EU cuts off its preferential market and pricing to Guyana.
The latter three culprits were the architects of a duncified deal with the Norwegians with so many stringent conditions that we have locked up our forests for the Norwegians to profit by getting carbon credits while we cannot get any money in return because we cannot meet the very conditions the three idiot savants in mismanagement have agreed to. Dr. Frank Anthony runs probably the smallest and most inconsequential ministry in the country yet he is exposed on what seems like a daily basis by a Ruel Johnson for his glaring managerial inadequacies.
Dr. Jennifer Westford and Dr. Gopaul have presided over a growing debacle of contract workers (largely PPP comrades and soup drinkers) getting paid like highway robbers while the regular public service have to protest for a decent increase. Dr. Bheri Ramsaran oversees the nation’s public hospital which was recently avoided by the Home Affairs Minister when he fell ill.
These are some of the supposedly eminently qualified denizens of the PPP politburo. We must distinguish them from the unqualified within government such as Clement Rohee and Donald Ramotar who just like their qualified compadres are also very qualified in incompetence, failure, non success and non performance. Ashni Singh might be able to fool the bumpkins who swoon over the piles of degrees, certificates, doctorates and Masters adorning people’s names, but he cannot fool people who know how to make out the qualified fool and qualified incompetent.
The Ashni Singhs and Vishnu Bisrams need to cut the crap and call a spade a spade. This is taxpayers’ money going down the drain and the Guyanese people have a right to question Alexei Ramotar regardless of his qualifications or the state of the brain drain, which incidentally is caused by these frightening acts of seemingly continued nepotism where Alexei Ramotar gets to keep his job for failing and mismanagement.
Only in the peculiar mind of Ashni Singh would investors looking to invest their hard-earned money in a corrupt failed state like Guyana under Ashni Singh and his friends not want to know of the delays, failures and breakdowns surrounding projects and life in general in the PPP’s Guyana. Ashni Singh must think these investors have money to waste.
He must think everyone thinks like him and the rest of the PPP charlatans who have no problem wasting other people’s money with reckless schemes, ill-planned misadventures and plain old corruption and colossal failure. I would like to know how much Alexei Ramotar is being paid for this disaster.
M. Maxwell

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