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Jagdeo on oil- money transparency
…Editorial
Kaieteur News- To balkanize is to divide or split up in identifiable subsets. Guyana’s Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo, said this recently during a recent press engagement: “How do you balkanize revenue coming into the budget? (It) becomes a very difficult thing to do; so, where the transparency is done, transparency is that every cent spent from oil money, from non-oil revenue and from borrowing, has to be appropriated by the National Assembly through a Budgetary Appropriation Process, whether it is the original Budget or through Supplementary Budgets which then form an appropriation act or a supplementary appropriation act, which itemizes all of the expenditure of the state and how much is going to be spent…”.
We strenuously disagree with Jagdeo. It is not “very difficult” to deliver the kind of transparency Guyanese need with withdrawals from their Natural Resource Fund (NRF). In typical fashion, what Jagdeo doesn’t want to reveal, he wraps in mud. He gives this long, drawn out speech, so that oil withdrawal transparency is clouded in a hail of words. Jagdeo came up with 89 words that filled a page about how “very difficult” it is to deliver transparency, but still left nothing but blankness. The question is why is the much-needed transparency on withdrawals from the NRF causing he and his PPPC Government so many fits? What is there to hide, why does he have to go to these lengths of disingenuousness?
It is early December, and to this point, GY$239.176B has been withdrawn from the NRF. We invite the PPPC Government and Vice President Jagdeo to share with Guyanese how that money was spent. It should not be that “very difficult” (to use Jagdeo’s words) to present the tranches into which that close to a quarter of a trillion Guyana dollars went. We will also use Jagdeo’s word (“balkanize”) and ask him to be serious enough and straight enough to do what he resists, i.e., disclose to the owners of the NRF the projects in which those billions were put. A leader of Jagdeo’s versatility should be able to do what is simple, but which he has made it his duty to insist is “very difficult.”
The fact that the man in charge of this nation’s oil sector is publicly confessing about his own and the PPPC Government’s weaknesses and limits with oil money withdrawal transparency is troubling. Is he telling Guyanese that there is ignorance at the highest levels relative to accounting for oil money withdrawals? Or, is the truth of the matter that the government is pretending at such, because of what it may have probably done with those NRF withdrawals? That is, poured some of its billions down a black hole that has corruption stamped all over it? It boggles the mind that something that both Jagdeo and the PPPC Government should see as a priority, as what is most basic to proper oil management, has degraded to this unpersuasive public posture.
It is a posture (“balkanize” and “very difficult”) that flies in the face of good sense. To be frank, it invites interpretations about what is asinine. A government that takes the care to handle the people’s oil money in the most principled manner would be enthusiastic to present to them how their money was used. Yet, there is this appalling attempt at dodging what must be a fundamental objective of oil money management. Accounting to the people in a reasonable and transparent manner. The NRF Act came to life in a haze of dodges and under the cover of night. This latest effort at dissembling is a mere continuation of what started out with the suspicious and now has all that is sinister about it. The missing provisions in the NRF that would penalize those who steal, or collude with others playing games with oil money withdrawals, now manifest their political utility.
There is the nation’s premier oil strategist and manager, Jagdeo, having the gall to inform Guyanese how “very difficult” it is to be specific, to be transparent, with oil monies. If that is next to impossible, then what do the stewards sitting on top of the oil proceeds have to present to Guyanese in accounting for withdrawals from the NRF?
(Jagdeo on oil- money transparency)
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- Editorial, Jagdeo on oil- money transparency, Natural Resource Fund, oil withdrawal transparency, PPPC Government, Vice President Jagdeo
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