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Peeping Tom is misleading the public

Apr 25, 2014 Letters

Dear Editor,
I wish to respond to an opinion column by Peeping Tom appearing in your newspaper on 21st April 2014 entitled “The AFC is attempting to hookwink Guyanese”.  In it, the author appears unwilling to accept the rationale put forward by the Alliance For Change for not approving this year’s budgetary estimates of G$1.1 Billion appearing under the heading Amerindian Development Fund.
In response to a newspaper advertisement placed by the party, expressing concerns over accountability with regard to the projects listed under that heading, Peeping Tom states the following:
“The Amerindian Development Fund is not an ad hoc arrangement. It is part of the Guyana Red-Investment Fund (GRIF) which is responsible for administering projects under the Low Carbon Development Strategy. It is an undertaking with developed project plans, timelines and reporting requirements consistent with standards and best practices established by the UNDP. The ADF is being implemented by the United National Development Project which appoints the Project Manager.
Further, the disbursement of funds from GRIF for this project is overseen by the GRIF Steering Committee.”
This statement is misleading because it gives the impression that all projects listed under the heading Amerindian Development Fund are funded from the GRIF and implemented by the UNDP. This is not entirely correct. While there is a GRIF project entitled “Amerindian Development Fund” which is being implemented with the UNDP as partner agency and subject to the various safeguards which Peeping Tom alludes to, there are other projects being funded and implemented outside of that mechanism that are also tagged  under the heading “Amerindian Development Fund”.
It is the latter category of projects that the AFC has refused to support and in particular the Youth Entrepreneurship and Apprenticeship Programme (YEAP) for which the sum of G$796 million was being sought in this year’s estimates.  This programme is not a GRIF program and is not being overseen by any independent partner agency and Peeping Tom needs to get his/her facts straight on this.
Our Government would like the public to believe that any projects branded with the terms Amerindian Development Fund or Low Carbon Development Strategy have met the stringent criteria applied to projects funded from the GRIF and are therefore good to go.  Many seem to be falling for this ruse and are being hookwinked into supporting a number of bogus projects that are of little or no benefit to the people of this country.
Dominic Gaskin

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