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Housing development

Oct 21, 2024 Editorial, Features / Columnists, News

Kaieteur News – Housing development in this country remains a major challenge despite the PPP/C Government’s boasts of their successes.

In this year’s budget, the sum of $78 billion was allocated for nationwide housing infrastructure development, Finance Minister Dr. Ashni Singh had said. This he said was aligning with the government’s commitment to providing affordable housing to Guyanese. He said too that the allocated funds will be utilised for substantial infrastructure projects in both new and existing housing schemes. These include the construction of roads, drains, bridges, and the installation of utilities to meet housing demands.

It is clear that this administration’s policy of allocating house lots is more of propaganda messaging rather than genuinely delivering affordable housing for Guyanese. Sometimes it is not unreasonable to believe that there is no clear plan in responding to the housing needs of low and middle-income citizens. The complaint remains that house lots are priced out of the reach of the poor working-class citizens.

Yet every morning before the crack of dawn scores are gathered in front of the Ministry of Housing if only to give themselves a chance at the spinning wheel of the roulette table that is for the high stakes of a coveted house-lot. It is ironic that in a land so huge, and so much so that its neighbours’ eye large portions of it covetously, that our people born and bred here have to put up with this unending nonsense, this palpable insult and injustice for a piece of land on which to construct a house, something to call their own home.

We have a mere 700,000 plus people, and we have been sharing out numerous house lots on a continuous annual basis as all Guyana is proudly reminded by one governing political group after another and yet there is this abomination and disgrace, where Guyanese must rise from their beds at 04:00hrs (or 03:00hrs) and hurry out on dangerous roads to line up for a house-lot. There has been enough time and opportunity to have a more citizen-friendly process, a more citizen-rewarding result. Of course, this is how the regular people are held hostage by politicians and their carefully chosen bureaucrats to torment and hold to ransom those who depend on them for things as routine as a house-lot.

In recent months, several people have come forward with complaints about the system currently employed to allocate house lots. In addition to the thousands waiting for years for a plot of land, there is the case where house lots yet to be developed are allocated to citizens who have to wait two to three years to access them.  Of the hundreds of citizens who have received titles as part of the government’s drive to meet its manifesto promise of delivering 50,000 house lots, a sizable number of them have not even seen the land and those who have seen the land cannot put down anything on it because the place is undeveloped.

This newspaper is aware of several cases where individuals were given timelines to pay off as much as $2.3M for housing units within two months of the allocation, but two years later, they are still to see the house. Many of those individuals- public servants with small salaries have had to borrow the funds to pay the Central Housing and Planning Authority for the land or risk losing it, yet the dream of owning the home is still some distance away. Something must be terribly wrong with the system that house lots are allocated with strict timelines to pay for it and yet the allottees have to wait years after to access the land. It is therefore not difficult to understand then why the system is so riddled with corruption, favouritism and adhockery.

Last week at his news conference, Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo spoke about how costly it is to develop one house lot. And while this might be true, this government has been wasting taxpayer’s money behind some of the many public infrastructure projects it has been undertaking – many of them mired in corruption. If they were to cut the waste and reduce the massive corruption in procurement then there might be enough funds to develop residential house lots thus reducing the high price poor citizens have to pay.

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