Just another form of free housing

Nov 02, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The PNC government of the period 1964-1985 had big plans. It had a Development Plan which was aimed at feeding, clothing and housing the nation by 1976.
By the time the 1980s rolled by food was in short supply, clothing had to come in barrels from overseas and squatting became a national pastime.
The PNC had more big plans. There was a plan for an aluminum smelter. This never materialized. There was a plan to build the Upper Mazaruni Hydroelectric Facility. The PNC blamed the Venezuelans for that one, but the real flaw was in the design of the project, which required that excess power be sold to Venezuela, at the time one of the world’s leading suppliers of petroleum.
There was a failed bid to establish a Glass Factory. A plant to assemble bicycles flopped. A leather factory also collapsed. Ethanol production was touted for sugar. Nothing came of this.
The PNC was noted for its big plans and small planning skills. Its big plans did not materialize simply because the know-how and capital were not available.
The PNCR is the successor to the PNC. It is now part of APNU. It is more accurate to say that it is, more or less, APNU. The PNCR has big plans for the housing sector. It wants to build apartments and condominiums so as to save Guyanese the hassle of having to find financing for their housing needs. The government’s big plans for the housing sector will cost it 50 billion dollars.
This is the latest wildcard project which the APNU+AFC coalition is launching. Instead of providing those who are in need of their own homes with land and allowing them to build, the government has bigger plans. It will provide them with duplexes and apartments and condominiums, just like it did in the 1970s when it launched its own massive housing schemes throughout Guyana.
The PNC has never learnt from its mistakes, because it has always felt that it did not make a mistake. The world was against the PNC, or so that party believed, and the world conspired to deny the PNC of its big plans.
Its low-cost housing schemes were turned into ghettos. People did not even want to pay the rent for the apartments that they rented from the government. Why pay when the government would not move you because you were one of its supporters?
When the PPPC came to power in 1992, it was forced to sell thousands of apartments to the owners for a meagre sum of $25,000. Even then, some persons said they could not afford to pay. They wanted it free. This is the sort of behaviour that the PNC encouraged under its housing programme.
Now APNU is saying that it wants to spend 50 billion dollars on its grand housing plan which will include apartments, duplexes and condominiums. This is another scheme that will end up gifting to supporters of the PNCR, fifty billion dollars in housing development. PNCR’s supporters will be handed these duplexes, apartments and condominiums and asked to pay back in installments. There will be defaults in payments but no action will be taken. It will turn out to be another form of free housing.

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