Wasteful Spending

There is a saying that willful waste makes for woeful want. And there have been many examples of this. There is also the Biblical saying about casting pearls before swine. And who can forget the saying that a fool and his money are soon parted.

These statements need no explanation. And life is full of examples of people wasting what they had. There was an American who won two lotto jackpots but who is broke today. In Guyana, a gardener won $100 million from the lotto some years ago.

He suddenly found so many advisors and people who were willing to sell him property. The property sellers charged him much more than the actual value of the property. Before long his money was gone.

The Man Above provided Guyana with oil wealth, a lot of it. The custodian of this wealth is the government. Immediately it embarked on a programme that could be considered nothing but wastage.

The first thing that it did was to create a new breed of contractors. None of this breed had even built a kennel or a pig pen. The excuse was that these men all had financial resources. The government also cast its net in Trinidad.

Guyana has had issues with Trinidad contractors in the past but Jagdeo and the PPP were not daunted. It was back to Trinidad for contractors to build roads in Guyana. Money was paid but the roads were never completed. To satisfy Guyanese, the government began to talk about liquidated damages.

But the worst were these new contractors created by the PPP Government. They got billions of dollars but failed to complete any project. The list of failed projects and their cost are astounding.

On Friday, former Minister David Patterson detailed some of them. The Cemetery Road project is more than a year behind schedule. Despite threats or supposed threats from Minister Juan Edghill the project remains stalled.

Then came word that jumbie, or as the Minister said, spirits, prevented the men from working. That would have been the third road being constructed along that stretch. There was the first road, then the other carriageway that necessitated that tombs be removed.

The late Claude Merriman, a Minister of Works, was entrusted with removing the tombs in the path of the second roadway, the one to the west of the two-lane carriageway through the cemetery.

There were tombs containing embalmed bodies. Some had bones that the contractors put into bags to be placed elsewhere.

At no time did jumbies or spirits affect either the tomb removal or the road construction. Needless to say, this was before the PPP era.

The government has now added two additional contractors to the project without terminating the original contract. Friends and families have privileges.

There is the road from Conversation Tree to nowhere. After collecting huge sums, the contractor simply refused to complete the project. The headlines subsequently read that the government had rescinded the contract.

The Railway Embankment is another project that seems to be going nowhere. At the start, heavy equipment dug large ditches. Then the large trucks came with tons of sand and loam to stockpile along the ditches. That is as far as the project has gone.

Judging from the pace that the government was trying to remove establishments along the embankment one was led to believe that the road would have reached Mahaica by now. The West Demerara road project is similarly in a state of incompletion.

Nearly $400 million was allocated for the construction of a primary school at Bamia. That school should have been completed two years ago. Again, the contractor is a friend. The school may be completed in the new year.

Those are not the only projects that beg to be completed. There are other projects that are in the same state. Take the new Demerara Harbour Bridge. That project should have been completed two years ago.

Again there was great haste to remove the people at Herstelling. That bridge is now only 20 percent complete. The amount of money spent is mindboggling.

It is the same with the drive to reopen the sugar estates closed by the Granger administration. Four years on and despite the promise to have the Rose Hall Canje estate begin sugar production a year ago, the government has failed to deliver on this promise.

Contracts have been awarded for the construction of a 12-storey building aback of Eccles, East Bank Demerara to house the Ministry of Works. The contractor has been given $6 billion. Nothing has been done at the site. The contractor has received a $6 billion windfall.

He can bank that money and make a handsome profit by way of interest if he so desires. There is no pressure for him to get started.

This matter was raised in the National Assembly and the answer given by Minister Juan Edghill left me bemused.

He spoke of the site being changed as if that was a reason for the delay. He could not explain the contractor working on another major project to the exclusion of the Ministry’s 12-storey building.

Another wasteful project has to be the gas to shore project. To hear David Patterson talk about this project, one can only conclude that the government does not care how much money it is spending provided the project is different from the original design fashioned by the Coalition administration.

The length of the pipeline has been changed; money is being paid for the acquisition of property; and there is payment for the gas, which according to Patterson, was initially being brought to shore free of cost.

The government has more money than any government has ever had. Perhaps there is the belief that the money is so much that it cannot be spent in this lifetime.

But the saying that a fool and his money are soon parted still holds true.