KEEPING OUR PROMISES

Jan 10, 2016 AFC Column, Features / Columnists

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By Marlon Williams
AFC Member

“Wait, that is a concrete drain! Really, it is concrete!”  This was the astounded expression of a 35-year-old Attorney, as we walked down South Road in the Lacytown Ward.  He has been home and practicing law for just over 10 years, traversing that very route almost daily.  This man just did not know that there is a strong concrete structure lying below all the mud, waste and refuse that he had become accustomed to in that drain.
In truth, he had been one of the nay-sayers who did not support the idea of the AFC merging with the APNU coalition in February 2015.  Now he’s happy.  He’s seeing the results, benefiting from the change we promised.  Our conversation moved along and we strolled past the Chambers of the former Attorney General.
It shifted to Anil Nandlall and we began to speculate about what he meant when he said that this government should justify and account for the $300 Million which Minister of Public Infrastructure, David Patterson, indicated has been expended on the current “Clean up my Country” initiative.   We couldn’t find the answer, but more questions.  Was he finding more ways (as is the perpetually nauseating habit of the PPP) to deflect the public’s attention from their benefits?  We had one more for him:  since the PPP under his legal stewardship had spent over a billion dollars on a so-called one-off cleanup in 2014, why did our citizens’ yards, houses and businesses places keep right on flooding after five minutes of heavy rainfall?
A few weeks ago, in December 2015, the rain poured for hours, and lo and behold there was no flood water accumulated in my yard or thankfully my house.  The concrete drain beside my parapet didn’t even flow over.
A one-time PPP supporter put it like this: “It’s like me giving my clerk $5,000 to buy stationery and she comes back with a few sheets of paper.  I go myself the next day with a similar amount of money and return with a ream of photocopying paper, a pack of file folders, a box of envelopes and a nice pen.”  That was funny, but how could I laugh when the parable reminded me so vividly of the hurt this nation felt every time the PPP and their cohorts squandered our money?
When you chronicle the events of the last two years at least, you become convinced that destiny’s designer had it all worked out.  It’s a lot like the biblical story of little David who defeated Goliath the giant.  A relatively small, innovative, nationalistic, morally-driven agent of change, the AFC, filed a No Confidence motion (the slingshot) that led to national elections (the stone), which led to the end of the PPP’s dread lock on this country (the fall of a giant).  Our story has a slight variance though: it was a David who filed that motion and another David who has become Leader.
What’s more, this happened just as our beloved country was being positioned to benefit from its inheritance – a large find of a basin filled with oil and gas, Black Gold. A quote from the renowned Albert Einstein comes to mind: “Everything is determined, the beginning as well as the end, by forces over which we have no control. It is determined for the insect, as well as for the star.  Human beings, vegetables, or cosmic dust, we all dance to a mysterious tune, intoned in the distance by an invisible piper.”
In our hands now is our destiny, and though it is an uphill task to bring our country back from an economic precipice, we are prepared, this coalition of six parties led by David and Moses. The passion that we share for ‘a-we Guyana’ is not blind though.  It drives us to see things objectively, like the Specialty Hospital.  We knew that it was an excellent investment, but we had objections while in opposition to the proposal in its then format that did not address the national needs in a holistic manner.  The proposal was deficient and as it was constituted, it would not have delivered the requisite services.
Guyana needs a specialty hospital, but it must be part of the broad initiative to improve the delivery of effective healthcare, which includes rehabilitation and modernization of hospitals nationwide; and equipping the healthcare network with trained, efficient human capital and modern equipment.  More importantly, we have to ensure that the Specialty Hospital does not become another Skeldon Estate fiasco.
Remember that Indian firm Surendra Engineering?  They have literally disappeared with over four billion of our taxpayer dollars.  Every effort to retrieve our money that the PPP handed to Surendra (supposedly) for almost nothing, even through the government of India, has failed so far.  For now we are thankful that Vice President and Home Affairs Minister, Khemraj Ramjattan, intervened to end Surendra’s thieving.   He vows to get back as much of those funds as possible while we proceed with the construction of the facility, utilizing mostly Guyanese labour.
One last thing…this nation is indeed resource-rich.  We are in the process of developing these resources and moving our economy from raw material-based to one that manufactures shelf-ready value-added products.  Development of our small to medium scale enterprises (SME’s) becomes key. The Ministry of Business has re-energized the Small Business Bureau to work directly with start-up micro ventures and small business owners who wish to expand and diversify.
Imagine me walking the supermarket aisles in the US and seeing them surrendering their organic foods sections to excellently packaged produce from Guyana. This same school of thought has driven Minister of Natural Resources, Raphael Trotman, to discuss with ExxonMobil the value of trapping escaping gases during the petroleum extraction processes.  Those gases are enough to power some industries.  In addition, with an unprejudiced microscope, he is on the way to stemming the illegal smuggling of our precious gold and diamonds out of the country and the resultant loss of royalties due to the national coffers.
Our word will remain our bond on national policies and the promises we made will be kept.  The national conversation on constitutional reform has begun and our Chairman Mr. Nigel Hughes, as head of the Steering Committee on Constitutional Reform, presented its interim report to Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo on Old Year’s Day – a prodigious start to a year of greater accomplishments.
This is the premise that the Alliance for Change was built on – moving Guyana onward and upward.

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