Dear Editor
On Sunday evening, as I was preparing to enjoy the solitude and solemnity with some music, there was a “blackout” in the area where I live, Lodge Housing scheme, and I’m told other areas suffered the same experience. This is becoming the norm. A normality if not arrested would lead this and succeeding generations down a dismal descent into darkness and death. Citizens should be reminded of the powers that be injunction, to use less air conditioning units. Even as we boast of being the fastest growing economy.
Now we hear another Turkish ship, let me crown it Turk III, is arriving here in December.
Dear Mr. President, unless you and your inscrutable management team recognise that the problem is with the people you identify to manage important sectors of the country, the problem will remain beyond resolution. Mr President and your many advisors, traditionally to get any system or enterprise up and running, you need the three M’s; money, machinery, and management, with our large sums of money, money and machinery could not be the problem, logic suggests it is poor management and, in some cases, corrupt management.
Examples are numerous. We just leant that more money is to be spent on the National Culture Centre, last week I attended a function at the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall and a friend reminded me that every few months there is a million-dollar project for the Sports Hall.
As part of the spending spree Central Government has taken over facilities that traditionally were part of Local Government responsibility. But the biggest one, is the infamous Gas to Energy project, when it will be completed and delivered as promised and at what cost, is another matter of vexation. Poor or corrupt management, that your pick.
Eating away at the soul of our society is the failure of the person identified to provide information to public, thank God for Christopher Ram and many others who are speaking up, the likes of Annette Ferguson, Vincent Adams, Mark Benschop, Lincoln Lewis, Janette Bulkan, Kenrick Hunte, Red Thread and others who are shedding light through the darkness.
Today, as I looked at the news there was yet another abomination, spurious excuses, such as the weather and difficulty getting building material to the site, the reason for the none completion of the $1.77B Karasabai school project. Why are we being treated as a bunch of idiots? The person who submitted the tender, the ministry’s evaluation team and the ultimate decision makers must have taken all, and I repeat all, of the above factors into consideration.
I have traversed every part of Guyana for over six decades, and weather, road conditions, and availability of materials, must be factors that the administration and their acolytes can not ignore. All made more challenging and exacerbated by the PPP government embarking on this silly spending spree.
In earlier times, no project, small or large, could be undertaken without professionally driven competent evaluation. But things are different these days.
I again throw out this challenge to the high command, to name any bridge, any road, any building that was contracted out to the new breed of local contractors, that was satisfactorily completed within the contracted sum and on time. The key question is satisfactorily completed, not like the “new” roads that were criticized by the US Secretary of State some months ago. Not like the $1.4B Port Kaituma wharf, in the Northwest.
How long must we endure excuses from the inscrutable, if not evasive, ruling elite. How could I not be reminded of Cassius words to Brutus in Shakespeare’s play Julius Ceaser; “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world, like a Colossus, and we petty men walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
Yours truly,
Elder Hamilton Green
