Dear Editor,
The maxim, ‘You never missed the water till the well run dry’ is a story which can be interpreted in many different ways. Some of us realize that when we leave our parents’ home and try to live on our own; others experience this with an illness or accident that results in us losing the ability to do basic hygiene. We can go on and on, but the gist of the story should remind us that we should live this life in an honest, healthy and helpful way, supporting our brothers and sisters along the way.
As we aspire to elevate ourselves in life, we often do things that we later regret. Is it different when our government is the problem? When the Guyanese taxpayer reads that our national debt is $400 billion, do we actually know how much debt it is? I will break it down like this:
400 billion dollars is 400,000 million dollars, ie, 400,000 x 1,000,000 or 400 x 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000.
Now if you earn $100,000 per month, it will take you 4,000,000 months or 333,333 years to earn $40B. And if you earn $50,000 per month, it will only take you just over 666 thousand years to earn the same amount. With a population of 750,000 men, women and children, we each owe just over $533,000. So if each one of us (including the baby born today) could write a cheque to the government for $500,000, our problem would solved.
Having enumerated the quantum of our debt, we must understand that a government is expected to provide a higher level of social services to its citizens than private corporations.
Every day private corporations and governments work on deals that are aimed to satisfy their objectives. While corporations are expected to evaluate their project using various accounting and economic models, like Net Present Value (NPV), Internal Rate of Return (IRR), Payback period, etc, governments may not have to do a project to satisfy those models. As mentioned earlier, governments are required to provide services to their citizens even if those services do not contribute directly to revenue generation.
We are all aware that resources are scarce, and there are various projects seeking to compete for those scare resources. Here is where Moses Nagamootoo stands out as a thinker and a visionary. Governments ought not to spend taxpayers’ money willy-nilly, as our present government is doing. Each project should be evaluated on its merit and compared with other projects which are likely to maximize the return on investments (whether those benefits are profits or social).
The PPP government has in its circle Manzoor Nadir. Maybe, they should have asked him, or he should have given them a copy of Highway to Happiness written decades ago. It may have helped the government to at least do some critical thinking before they embark on their wasteful projects. Many such projects come to mind such as the Skeldon sugar factory, the Speciality hospital, the road to a dry waterfall, and so on.
Now we are told that we have to spend billions of dollars to build more roads. I totally agree that Guyana needs to build many new roads, but the government should not build because it has to.
It should critically evaluate where any new roads will bring the maximum return to our citizenry. To immediately reduce the traffic problem on our roads, could the wizards in the government actually do some thinking for a change. My proposal is that we change Sheriff Street and Vlissengen Road to one way traffic, and upgrade interconnected roads between these two roads. At the same time we can make the railway embankment and the East Coast road one way, and again upgrade interconnected roads between these two major roads. This move will immediately remove road congestion, and at the same time reduce road accidents. Our present road configuration is too narrow to facilitate two-way traffic on our major roadways. We should then use our scarce resources and build a new road parallel to the East Bank road and then make each road one way with many interconnected roads between them.
Let us build our country together.
Yours faithfully,
Charles Sugrim
