Dear Editor,
The Minister of Local Government, as has become normal now, bypasses the constitutional bodies for reasons only he can explain. ‘The Clean up my Country’ programme was announced since the budget presentation last year. One billion dollars was said to be allocated, with half of it earmarked for Georgetown. In a letter to the Minister yesterday I reminded him that in July 2014, he pointed to the programme as helping to ease the budgetary constraints the council faced in 2014, in light of cabinet’s non-approval of the two measures it recommended to deal with the budget shortfall of $33M. The issues surrounding the shortfall have played out on numerous occasions in the past and so I will not rehash them. Those same constraints face the council in 2015 and will be exacerbated in a few months. Needless to say the ‘Clean up my Country’ programme rolled out in other towns and regions in 2014, and has now come to Linden.
One meeting was called with the administration of the council and the Town Clerk sought to involve councillors, and two turned up at the RDC office. No meeting was held with the council to propose what we know better than the officers from Georgetown. You cannot come to Linden and decide upfront that you will hire 20 persons at $4,000 for one day to clean the entire community. That was the initial proposal from the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development’s (MLGRD) team.
Linden is 55 square miles with about 35% under habitation and over 240 kms of roads and footpaths. Like most parts of Guyana residents are simply dirty and uncaring of the environment, so they dump indiscriminately. Council with its meagre resources does a fair job in trying to keep the town centre and main thoroughfares clean. The D&I project which was enacted by the Jagdeo regime and paid $25,000 per month maintained roadsides and drains, and the only local government organ in Guyana purchased a truck exclusively for this exercise. Even though we were not involved in the process we knew its importance to the cleanliness of the town, hence our decision to purchase the truck. The Minister’s comments are therefore seen as being facetious and ill-tempered.
Note the D&I programme was halted around mid-year 2014.
The council indeed needs the additional help, and when I asked the Minister in July 2014 about sustaining the process he had no answer. The MLGRD team also said in the meeting last week that they will obtain a mini-excavator and gift same to the RDC. That means the main body responsible for carrying out such works in the town has to request use from the RDC. In my press conference recently I pointed out the difficulties we have encountered with getting most things done with the RDC, and the lack of collaboration in many instances. It is now clear to me that the MLGRD is following a blueprint to create divisions so that agendas are easily carried out. I dare any REO to stand up to these egregious and discriminatory positions of the MLGRD. They are simply self-destructive, and I understand their positions. I often tell officers to be careful, because say what we like, we cannot give them their job back if they fire them capriciously.
The MLGRD team listened to my two councillors and agreed to report back to the council. The next thing councillors knew was that the programme was rolled out and they were not told of the findings after discussion with the principals. I need not remind anyone that the same script played out with the Cevon’s Waste contract in Linden. I asked eighteen questions at the meeting with the Minister. He could not respond and promised findings on the questions. Next we heard that I should turn up at a meeting at the RDC for the signing of the contract. Well by now you know me…
On the rolling out of the programme I got sucked in because of my desire to get the most out of the project. I have a fair sense of a lot of what happens around the town as I should. A few councillors at the statutory meeting on Wednesday 29, pilloried me for knowing what happened and not calling a caucus. In fact had it not been for one councillor who asked if I was aware, I would have listened and moved on. I took time to explain that the administration sought my advice on the matter and I offered same. In fact my training told me some basic things were not done and a proper survey was not carried out. On Friday I went to the office for correspondence and asked for a copy of the programme. When I saw it, my fears were confirmed. I changed all prior plans and went out into the Central Amelia’s Ward area on Saturday to do a survey and found over 23 hot spots which I related to the Town Clerk and told her that the rest of the areas should be done that way. I know that was not done and the programme will not achieve 60% of its objective, not because they cannot do it but because the preliminary works were absent. The council would have avoided that. In fact the Millie’s Turn work took over 3 hours more than I had anticipated, which shows clearly that the Minister’s insinuations were out of place and contentious.
The Minister mentioned and invoked greed, wickedness, evil and all sorts of invective in his letter. No councillor wanted any contract and spoke of same. The feedback of opportunists is one of epic proportions and Minister needs to check on his sources to see who is fooling him. What the councillors wanted, and I supported, was for workers in each locale like the D&I to be employed in the exercise, instead of a mere twenty in the whole of Linden with 18 wards. Definitely each ward would have been different had the survey been done. South Mackenzie for example would have been an easy community to deal with, because of the general condition of those areas. From the foregoing you the readers can determine where these acts of ungodliness are coming from. The Minister must understand that acts which clearly marginalise the ideas and inputs of a militant community such as Linden are contraindicative of local democracy, which he espouses at each of his contrived and garlanded stages. Albeit, we need the general cleaning the council wants respected and its inputs taken on board, and not to be rubberstamped in an activity filled with charade.
Yours faithfully,
Orrin Gordon
