Dear Editor,
Over recent months there has been disaster after disaster at the sea wall from Kitty to Liliendaal; this is the result of a situation similar to that which Winston Churchill outlined in his famous speech on November 12, 1936 in the British parliament. I have taken the liberty of adjusting it somewhat for the Guyana situation by adding the two words, incompetence and corruption, as follows: ‘They go on in a strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent, corrupt and incompetent’; ‘Owing to past neglect, in the face of the plainest warnings, we have entered upon a period of danger. The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedience of delays, of incompetence and corruption, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.’ At least the British had Churchill to help them out of the mess they found themselves in at that time, totally unprepared to deal with Hitler, but here in Guyana of all the people on this planet who we have to depend on to steer us out of this morass of incompetence, confusion and indecisiveness is someone called Robson Benn, who thinks that jetties/groynes are there to stop wave action on our seawall to stop overtopping, and is wasting our money rebuilding them. They are there for an entirely different reason; anyone expecting that groynes can stop overtopping of the seawall is in for a big shock! See also Charles Sohan’s letter last week (SN, May 17).
The answer to this problem is to raise the sea defences 6ft with rip-rap from Kitty to Liliendaal. The Wikipedia dictionary/encyclopaedia tells us that “A groyne is a rigid hydraulic structure built from an ocean shore (in coastal engineering) or from a bank (in rivers) that interrupts water flow and limits the movement of sediment. In the ocean, groynes create beaches, or avoid having them washed away by longshore drift,” so you don’t have to be an engineer to tell that Mr Benn and his advisors are completely wrong; just look in a dictionary.
We are no better off in other areas; we have Robert Persaud whose arrogance and incompetence as a Minister of Agriculture is still apparent, especially with regard to his greatest failure, the decline of the sugar industry. During his tenure as minister 2006-2011 the industry performed as follows: in 2006 industry production was 259,470 tonnes dropping by 2012 to 218,688 tonnes and still falling, during this time. The European Union gave Guyana $27.6 billion to resuscitate/diversify the industry to make it more competitive; no one knows where this money went. He is now overseeing the mining industry as well, the only viable industry we have left. I am not going to try to analyse all of the incompetence we have in our country’s governance.
But I have to mention our attorney general, Mr Anil Nandlall as the government’s top legal political appointee ‒ he who convened a press conference in Freedom House last week. Is paramountcy of the party still alive in this country? He continually violates the law by attempting to block the decisions of the Guyana Parliament and as such he is constantly violating the constitution. He first accuses a section of the media of racially profiling the award of the radio licences and uses the ridiculous concept that the licences were not issued racially since there was a geographic evenness in the way they were awarded. This rubbish is total contempt for my intelligence. In addition, for him to tell us now that the licences were issued to people who had the means to operate a radio station is ludicrous and unacceptable. No one is aware that people who had previously applied were called in to assess whether they had the means to operate a radio station before Mr Jagdeo issued them. These misrepresentations and stupid excuses are perpetrated to hide the real agenda of the PPP, which is to make everyone else impotent in this country to properly finance an election to challenge them, so that they can stay in power.
But in fact there was an agreement between the PPP and the opposition which is stated clearly in the dialogue as to how the licences should be issued, since the bi-partisan committee on broadcasting co-chaired by Gail Teixeira and Dereck Bernard had recommended (which both sides signed on to) that the most important method of selection of radio and television owners was to choose owners who reflected the ethnic composition of the areas to be served.
I am appealing to the opposition again publicly, the broadcast authority should be immediately dissolved and replaced with a more bi-partisan, independent and autonomous one, and the method of their selection must guarantee their independence. If not, the consequences will be that in any future election the opposition will have no voice.
The people of this nation, due to their lack of interest in the quality of their governance, who are interested only in racial voting and are swayed by the falsehoods perpetrated by the PPP, will continue to pay the penalty.
Yours faithfully,
Tony Vieira
