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THE YEAR THAT WENT BY FAST

Dec 31, 2015 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The year 2015 flew by like an F-16 fighter jet. You only saw its traces; that is how fast it went by. The last half of the year went faster. Indeed it went so fast that even the coalition must be wondering what was achieved over their first seven months.
Things move rapidly in the world. The only thing that goes slow is governments and the current government has, as the satirists would say, been on a “slow march”.
The solution is not quicker governments. Governments have a notorious reputation of going slow. Major projects, none of which have been initiated by the APNU/AFC administration, take a minimum of three years to develop.
This is why APNU/AFC had to swallow its pride and agree to the original airport project that was developed by the PPP and which the APNU/AFC had promised to scrap.
This is also the APNU/AFC that has to go along with the Specialty Hospital. If they are to build any other hospital, it will take at the minimum five years from conception to the start of construction.
This is why also the government has again been forced to do an independent assessment of the Amaila Falls Hydroelectric Project and dump its own plan for the development of the Mazaruni Basin. It knows that its own plans will take ten years and therefore it will have to go along and build the very project that it condemned the PPP for.
There is nothing more in the pipeline that was not already being developed by the PPP. There is shortage of ideas within the new government and this is handicapping the administration.
Money is not the problem. Ideas and plans are the problem. Everything is being done in an ad hoc manner. There are so far no plans outlined for attracting new investment. The investment and export promotion agency has not yet been restructured. The government is flipping and flopping.
Come next year they will be wining and dining. The attention will be on events leading up to May 26, 2016, Guyana’s fiftieth anniversary, and more importantly, the first anniversary of the coalition. No one has condemned the political opportunism of having the official inauguration take place on the very day that Guyana was marking its Independence.
Everyone hopes for the best and looks past the dangerous signals that are emanating from the government’s camp. No one has questioned that the cost of the Commission of Inquiry into the sugar corporation.
The Commission of Inquiry lasted a few months and reports indicate that the cost of the proceedings ran into tens of millions to produce a report which has not yet been released for the public and which, from all accounts, does not aim to do anything different from what the PPP may have been planning to do.
In the seventies, everyone screamed when the PNC flag was flown over the Court of Appeal and when paramountcy of the party was instituted.
Yet no one is saying anything about the greening of public buildings such as the National Sports Hall and the Gymnasium. Green is the colour of APNU and if public buildings are being deliberately painted in green, then these buildings are bearing the colours of partisanship.
These are dangerous developments in Guyana, but not as dangerous as the fact that a whole year has gone by so quickly and a growing economy, the fastest growing in the Caribbean, is suddenly likely to register either zero or only marginal growth. That is dreadful, but not as dreadful as the fact that there seems to be no plan in place to resurrect the economy.

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