Dear Editor,
The Kaieteur News article dated October 20, 2008, captioned ‘Guyana to get more aid to fight drug trafficking’ must be a piece of news that perks the interest of every Guyanese. According to the article, in a recent exclusive interview with KN, the US Ambassador to Guyana, Mr John Jones, stated that Guyana is to benefit from increased assistance from the US government to help in the fight against drugs. Mr Jones’s predecessor would have stated that such assistance depended on the successes scored by local drug enforcement agencies. It’s clear that there were concerns that caused the Ambassador then to hint at some kind of conditionality to be attached to such assistance.
So the obvious question now is whether the US, as a matter of policy, has attached conditionalities to such assistance? And if those conditions indeed existed, are they now being removed, and if so, why?
While Guyanese would welcome any assistance the country can get to combat the growing drug trade, we are concerned as to whether foreign aid is actually used for the purpose intended. Further, there are usually no actual benefits or successes the people can identify as stemming from the assistance. Instead we see more ‘junkies’ on the streets, more contract-type killings, more drug mules being nabbed in the US after they passed Timehri airport, more gang warfare, and other kinds of drug-related ills. Guyanese have time and again called for international financial lending agencies and friendly nations to attach some kind of conditions to loans or assistance coming to Guyana. The conventional position that Parliament and the people should serve as oversight bodies to ensure that foreign aid and loans serve their intended purposes is not sufficient. This situation becomes more complicated in an environment where transparency remains a concept waiting to be explored, and when all the government needs to do is to legitimize their policy by a simple majority vote in the parliament.
This KN headline comes at a time when Guyana has just been declared the most corrupt English-speaking country in this hemisphere, according to a recent survey by Transparency International. At the US Embassy-sponsored Guyana Civil Military Relations Conference held in Guyana on August 11-14, 2008, in which the Guyana government refused to participate, a number of participants expressed concerns about aid coming to Guyana without conditions. At a meeting in Trinidad in June 2004, international donors and international funding institutions met with Caribbean governments and stakeholders to report on funds dispersed in member countries to help in the fight against HIV/AIDS. At this meeting it was reported that while Guyana was a major recipient of these funds, there was ample evidence that the funds were not being fully utilized for the purpose which was intended. The government’s representative, who is still a minister, can attest to this, since he was a participant, like me. Just as I am doing now, I raised the concern about oversight and monitoring of these funds, and there was a grudging acknowledgement that indeed some mechanism should be established by the funding agencies to monitor how these funds are spent. I am not sure if there was any movement towards this end.
But today we hear that more funds will be coming to Guyana to help in the war against drugs, even as citizens remain in a state of ignorance with regard to how previous funds were utilized to assist in purging the society of illicit drugs and the success, if any, which resulted.
Guyanese would like to hear more from Ambassador Jones on how his govern-ment intends to work with the people of Guyana and major stakeholders to ensure that maximum benefit is derived from the employment of these funds. We are aware that as a sovereign nation our domestic laws are paramount in relation to any international rules and regulations, however, in a state where the ideals of democracy, transparency and good governance seem distant giving rise allegations of rampant corruption and mismanagement, the people become the ultimate victims.
Yours faithfully,
Lurlene Nestor
