Former President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday be-moaned crime here saying that from his comparative analysis of his party’s governance to the current APNU+AFC-led government, the situation is worse.
“Crime is growing rapidly because of the disintegration of morale in the police force and they are not sure about what the president wants. Nobody is sure about what the president wants,” Jagdeo told a press conference yesterday at PPP headquarters on Robb Street.
“It has never been this bad. People are now robbing hospitals (and) they went into two hotels. When you start going into hotels, robbing hotels, then that sends a strong signal on tourism. If criminals can go into a hotel and rob it soon they might go into funeral parlours, who knows,” he added.
Jagdeo’s tenure as President has been widely accepted as seeing the worst manifestation of crime in the country’s history.
The former President pointed to the police statistics which said that crime has been on the decrease, with their latest figures pegging it as down by twenty one percent as compared to the same time last year.
But he says that government seems to be giving mixed messages as they simultaneously say that crime is down but then have Prime Minister Moses Nagamootoo’s office write that because of the war on drugs that drug dealers have switched to crime.
“On one hand you are hearing that there is no increase in crime then on the other the sycophant contradicts them and says it is happening,” Jagdeo asserted.
He says that while some may point to myriad reasons for the slowdown in the economy, he believes that the main reason, and from which all other factors are formed, is because of bad economic governance by the APNU+AFC administration. “It is an explanation for an incompetent government, incompetent government on the economy,” he stated.
Listing reasons given by government for Guyana’s sluggish economy, Jagdeo countered in defence of his party.
“On the economy itself, we have had various explanations from the government on why things have slowed down. First of all, they (say) ‘it is our neighbours that slowed down so what is the big deal?’ But we had to point out that those neighbours relied on oil and gas for most of their income. They on the other hand, saved close to…per annum sixty billion dollars in importing fuel. You should be doing better not worse because you have saved money on importing fuel. Unlike Trinidad, Suriname or Venezuela that have lost substantial amounts of their revenues from their loss of oil. So they moved away from that. Then it was global slowdown in commodities…and that the PPP left them a bad economy and things can’t happen we had to divert funds …when you look at the PPP economy it was the fastest growing economy in this part of the hemisphere for the past 10 years,” he said.
“Things that they said were a liability and we have stolen the funds but there are tens of billions there. We left a pipeline of projects that was worth over US$800M. We left a solid economy. The oil and gas was left under the PPP. How could you say that the economy was in a bad shape when you inherited it? You have to be sick you have to delusional,” he added.
He stressed that with all the allegations against his party that money from illegal drug proceeds was what kept the economy afloat, he was yet to see hard evidence.
“Having failed on all of those things they say ‘it must have been the drug money that was keeping the economy alive. The lackeys say that it is because we have cleaned up the country of drug money but where is the evidence of that cleaning? Where is the evidence that you have stopped the 15000 ounces of gold that you claimed was being smuggling per week? Where is there evidence in this?” Jagdeo questioned.
“It is not the drug money that is causing the slowdown, rice is down, sugar is down, logging has practically collapsed…It is that production is shrinking and there are no new investments because of the public pronouncements of this government. So if you don’t have money flowing into investment and the local sector doesn’t want to invest that is where the slowdown is. You tell the people who have lost their jobs it is drug money,” he added.
