Are Guyanese a special kind of undeserving fools?

Jun 27, 2021 Letters

DEAR EDITOR,

It came as no surprise that former Minister Ferguson, with her penchant for nonsense, would seek to question Ashni Singh in the recent sitting of Parliament about the $30 billion bond borrowed by her APNU+AFC party, allegedly to revitalise GuySuCo.
Ferguson could have gotten most of the information she wanted from her old ministerial circle, but she probably thought the PPP Government was squandering the remainder of $17.5 billion that was drawn down, so she chose the big stage – parliament, to further embarrass the ousted APNU+AFC regime. The revelation from Ashni showed that her government was using monies from the bond to service the debt on the bond – the kind of silly stuff people without collateral do to raise their credibility to get bigger loans in the future.
Ashni said that the GuySuCo bond “was not raised through a competitive process as far as can be ascertained” and argued that the arrangement committed the government to pay a 4.75 percent interest rate “at a time when its Treasury Bills would only have cost one percent or thereabout.” Even more damning was this assessment from Ashni – “the cost savings that would have been incurred (by the use of Treasury bills) would have been around $2.1B.”
The analysis here is that there was a conspiracy to defraud the Guyanese people of 2.1 billion dollars. I cannot envision Ferguson receiving anything less than the wrath of her fellow APNU+AFC parliamentarians for asking for yet another “can of worms” produced by the APNU+AFC government to be released to the prying eyes of the public.
This commentary is not intended to malign Ferguson and the past APNU+AFC regime, the disclosures of their transgressions keep coming like the torrential rains that recently inundated Guyana. It is to enlighten the Guyanese people of the possible reason for the continued disregard that the beneficiary of 2.1 billion dollars has for the people of Guyana, reflected in the poor service provided – two tellers working while there is space for five while customers are dehydrating in the line outside at their branches. Despite a ton of letters in the media about this mistreatment, not a finger is lifted to improve service to customers.
If our government could have committed to handing over 2.1 billion dollars on a platter when better could have been done, government and people must be seen as a special kind of undeserving fools.

Respectfully,
Rudolph Singh

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