The Govt. is sluggish because it’s carrying around too much fat

Mar 09, 2018 Peeping Tom

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The Ministry of Finance announced that it will be using the site of the old GNCB Sports Club to construct an annex. The proposed annex will cost $225M. The building will house the office of the Valuation Division of the Ministry of Finance, and (note this) a training room, a sports complex and a gym. Is this how public funds are being squandered – to build a sports complex, a gym and training room?
The $225M is likely to only be the cost of constructing the building. Putting in the furnishings, the gym and training equipment and remodeling it to accommodate the Valuation Division is going to send the price tab further up. By the time this is finished, the final cost is likely to end up being half a billion dollars.
This project should be revisited. A contract has already been signed and so it cannot be pulled back. But instead of building an annex for the Ministry of Finance, this building can be used for existing government agencies which presently have to rent private buildings.
When the government could not find the money to pay severance to the terminated sugar workers, it said that each Ministry would be examining its respective budgets to see where cuts can be made. Yet, it has not seen the wisdom of sacrificing this plan to build an annex to the Ministry of Finance.
Why does the Ministry of Finance, which already has a large complex on Main Street, need a training room? The Ministry of Finance should be employing highly qualified and technical staff who are already trained. They should utilize existing space in case they need to do any training sessions or hold meetings. How many training sessions are there likely to be each year to justify building a structure to house a training room? There are other places whose facilities can be used for such training.
And why a gym? Since when has it become the responsibility of the Ministry of Finance to ensure that their staffers are physically fit? And why a sports complex? Experience has shown, over the years, that not only are these facilities not utilized, but when used, they cater mainly for drinkers.
The GNCB Sports Club, ironically where the new complex is to be located, was underutilized by staff. It had to be heavily subsidized by the corporation. The Guyana National Service Sports Complex suffered the same fate. Sprostons Sports Club used to be frequented more by non-workers than workers. The same is likely to be true of Transport Sports Club. A number of state corporations ended up having to spend huge sums each year to keep these facilities going.
Workers want to go home when the workday is ended. Most of them live out of town and they have no time for gym and sports after work. As such, these facilities remain underutilized. If the Ministry of Finance wants to keep its workers fit, it should offer to pay their gym fees each month. They will save a lot more money than having to provide a gym.
Admittedly, there is a need for new offices for the Valuation Division. But ideally, this Division should have long been divested from the Ministry of Finance and placed under the Ministry of Communities. Or it should be placed under the purview of the Lands and Surveys Commission. There is no need for the Ministry of Finance to hold responsibility for this division. But why was the old GRA building on Main Street, which has three stories and is almost one block long, used only to house the Bureau of Statistics. That building could have comfortably housed both the Bureau of Statistics and the Valuation Division, and even the offices of NICIL.

The Ministry of Finance is setting a precedent. What is going to happen if all government ministries decide they want a sports complex and a gym?
At the ideological level, what is happening within the government is worrying. The bureaucracy is costing the government more than $568M per day on recurrent expenditures alone. The government needs to reduce the size of the bureaucracy. It needs to make government smaller and more affordable, so that it can spend more on satisfying the needs of the people. Why should a country with a small population like Guyana, be spending so much each day on keeping the government going?
The government is complaining about having to provide $12B a year for the sugar industry. This is however a mere two weeks of what is spent by government on recurrent expenditures to support the work of its ministries, agencies and departments.
The government is sluggish because it is carrying around too much fat. And it is now adding to its burdens through extravagant and unnecessary capital works such as the proposed annex at the site of the old GNCB Sports Club.

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