Stop playing the blame game and get on with your work

Sep 24, 2015 Letters

Dear Editor,
Recently, I have noticed increasing calls for a comprehensive audit to be undertaken at the Mayor & City Council, calls I believe every taxpayer and indeed every citizen should join if they want to see their city properly managed.
Let me first debunk this claim by Junior Finance Minister Jaipaul Sharma who asserted that because the City Council is a part of the Local Government system, therefore it is beyond the control of Central Government. That is bunkum. The government over the years has pumped hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars into the City Council in addition to its yearly subvention and therefore has a right and obligation to see that this money was properly spent. Additionally, the Auditor General of Guyana has a responsibility to audit the accounts of all public agencies, including Ministries and other government bodies, including Local Government to ensure that all monies are spent responsibly and for the purposes intended. The Audit Office can conduct financial audits of all publicly funded entities, including donor-funded entities, Local Government agencies and Trade Unions in Guyana, if they believe all is not well within that agency (as we all know is the case at City Hall for years now), without being invited to do so by the particular agency, in this case the Mayor and City Council.
Secondly, there is a most absurd letter in the press that has been authored by the Georgetown City Council’s Public Relations Officer in which she has clearly overstepped her mandate as she seeks to represent her bosses at City Hall.
In this letter, she is calling for an audit to be done on the spending of the $500M that was handed over to the Ministry of Local Government under the watch of then Minister Mr. Norman Whittaker, for cleaning of Georgetown under the “Clean up my country” project and for which she said there is not much credible evidence of works done in the City. Yet I see this very administration using numerous skip bins that were made available through this “Clean up my Country” initiative’, some of which they have painted over with the new ‘Green City’ slogan, deliberately. Of course, they are trying to mislead citizens into believing that these are new resources.
She then goes on to list what she considers to be indiscretions committed by the former Town Clerk, all the more reason why there should be a forensic audit conducted at City Hall for then and now.
The role of the City’s PRO should be to promote the image and identity of our capital rather than to get involved into politics and to seek to denigrate the previous administrators.
Just stop playing the blame game and get on with your work, providing the tax payers with a proper service, which they are entitled.
Debra Gibson

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