The Story within the Story…When officials lose respect for our regulators

Jul 09, 2017 News

By Leonard Gildarie

Laws are what make the world more bearable. Without them, there would be chaos. Laws are

Leonard Gildarie

simply rules that bind all people living in a community. Laws protect our general safety, and ensure our rights as citizens against abuses by other people, by organizations, and by the government itself. We have laws to help provide for our general safety. These exist at the local, state and national levels.
In Guyana, there are laws about food safety; we license our doctors and lawyers and engineers and even speed limits and traffic regulations for when you are driving. We have rules governing how we grant concessions like our forests and mining lands to investors – both local and foreign.
More importantly, for me, we have laws that govern how our public officials should behave in office. How they spend our money. How they account for it.
We cannot continue to run our country in the manner it was allowed to in the last decade.
The seeming good life was one big bubble that had to burst sometime. We were moving money, in a highly irregular manner, from one area to the next to temporarily fix problems that appeared. There was little regard for accountability and transparency.
The current housing slump is one example how one entity, flushed with money and lands, pushed a programme that went into a downward spiral.
We ran out of lands and we allowed contractors to rape it with little scrutiny to what we paid them. The roads are falling apart in many of the schemes and roads are too narrow.
Under a new management and Government, it has been found that little thought went into the hundreds of acres that went to private developers who just could not deliver to their commitments.
As a consequence, more than 25,000 applications for house lots and homes are on the files of the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA), while large swaths of East Bank Demerara lands remain vacant.
Where was the authority and its oversight responsibilities to ensure that contractors and developers kept their word? We have many cases of these…from the Guyana Forestry Commission, the Guyana Geology and Mines Commission and National Frequency Monitoring Unit. I would not even dare talk about what happened at the Neighbourhood Democratic Councils and the Regional Democratic Councils.
Situations such as occurred with BaiShanLin should never have happened had we been paying attention and following regulations.
The Auditor General has repeatedly complained, over the years, that most of his recommendations to improve accountability have been ignored. Specifically, he said that only a small percentage of that which was recommended in his reports was fully implemented.
”Each year, my office issues recommendations to Ministries, Departments and Regions that are designed at improving systems and practices at these entities and improving the government’s governance and accountability mechanisms.”
“Overall, I am concerned with the lack of action towards the implementation of these recommendations.”
The Auditor General has said that in many instances, recommendations are repeated each year without appropriate action and as a result, weaknesses and issues that impacted negatively on
Government’s governance and accountability mechanisms continue to occur.
There is an entire office – the Audit Office – that is responsible for ensuring we follow the correct procedures when spending state funds. The Permanent Secretaries and other accounting officers in the various ministries and agencies all know what is required.
So why did our regulatory bodies and consecutive administrations allow the situation to reach this stage?
It is a combination of factors. When you deviate from systems you open the door for fraud and corruption. More importantly, it shows total disrespect for our regulatory bodies.
This administration has an uphill task of rebuilding the respect for these bodies.
If the rebuilding process has to involve some law tweaking to force the respect, then so be it.
The custodians of our money have to understand that the days of lawlessness and corruption will be dealt with in a harsh manner and that the jail doors are open. It is the only way to pull this country back from the brink.

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