Dear Editor,
I refer to letters dealing with the government’s management of our natural resources. Mr. Seelochan Beharry, a key writer on government’s investment in the natural resources sector, views the PNC government negotiations as bad deals but he fails to address the PPP’s reaction to the investment deals inherited from the PNC. Mr. Beharry said the PPP’s condemned the PNC government agreements but failed to re-negotiate those agreements when they came to power. Mr. Beharry is forgetting to mention something here.
Mr. Beharry would recall that the PPP re-negotiated investment deals inherited from the PNC. It is under the PPP government that Barama was given more forestry concession. Today Barama owns more than one tenth of the country’s soil. Guyanese are still struggling to get a house lot and land title. The PNC Omai agreement condemned by the then opposition PPP was re-negotiated under a PPP government. The PNC government charged Omai a 5 percent royalty. The PPP government re-negotiated the Omai’s royalty and is charging a 2.5 percent. It is becoming increasingly clear who is really negotiating bad deals.
In another letter addressing the issue of government investment deals Mr. Beharry and Mr. Trevor Atkinson (16/12/2006 & 6/1/2007) are of the view that because the PNC was not democratically elected, it became difficult to attract desirable foreign investment. It is said that the PPP is democratically elected and that Guyana has returned to the democratic fold, but there continues to be no desirable foreign investment. The democratically elected PPP are making bad deals of the inherited PNC investments by giving the country away as spelt out above. What really is the investment dilemma, Messrs Beharry and Atkinson: democratic governance or bad governance?
Yours faithfully,
Mohamed Yusuf
