Public Security Minister Khemraj Ramjattan on Friday apologised for incorrectly saying the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) pulled funding for the Safe City initiative over concerns about Chinese firm Huawei.
In responding to questions asked by Stabroek News during an Alliance for Change (AFC) press conference at the party’s Kitty headquarters, Ramjattan clarified that there is insufficient money left to complete the final leg of the project. The IDB has indicated this in a statement released to this newspaper days after Ramjattan spoke about the project on the 94.1 FM Jumpstart Show last month.
“Look, this matter must be put to an end in relation to Huawei and so on. It has now been brought to me and clarified by the IDB head that it is not necessarily because Huawei is a Chinese company and they won the contract that that is why we are not getting the command centre. The command centre is not being gotten because the monies from the US$15 million CSSP [Citizen Security Strengthening Pro-gramme] programme has come to an end almost. The monies that were left now for the command centre is not going to be in a position to even carry it half way and so that is why the command centre was not going to be completed under the CSSP programme,” Ramjattan said.
The minister reiterated that the award of the contract to Huawei had nothing to do with the command centre not being built with the IDB funding. “That association that was made, even if by me, unwittingly. I would like to apologise for it and take it back… [but] it was because of the…monies coming up short in relation to a brand new command centre,” he said.
He informed that the Ministry of Public Telecommunications has now taken on that project to get the command centre completed. “We have presently almost all the television equipment and smart equipment to put up on the lantern post in and around Georgetown but we now have to connect to the command centre,” he said, before adding that he hope to have a building, either a new or a rented facility, within another four to five months.
“But the equipment, as far as I am informed, are here from Huawei. Huawei is ready for installation but we have to get this infrastructure,” he added.
Asked about the negativity that the Chinese company is attracting, Ramjattan said that this is happening in certain countries, like the United States, under different circumstances. “…The little suspicions of threats or espionage or whatever that the Americans have we wouldn’t have because this is not 5G this is cameras and we have gotten equipment like this from other places. We don’t know about any spying on Guyana…but I can understand the Americans’ concerns,” he said.
“I don’t have any suspicion as security minister in relation to that. Their concerns are totally of a different fundamental characteristic and attribute than what we have here… we are not dealing with that so I don’t have any of those concerns,” he stressed.
After Ramjattan’s initial comments last month, the bank’s Country Representative Sophie Makonnen later said that the money remaining was insufficient to build the command centre. “The Command Centre, which is part of the Safe City Initiative, is not included in the original design of the CSSP. However, the Bank received a request to fund the construction of the Command Centre under the existing Programme but following an assessment and given the sizable requirements of the Command Centre as well as the financial resources needed to make it fully functional, it was realised that the existing funds remaining in the budget of the Programme would not be sufficient to fully fund an operational Command Centre,” Makonnen had said in a statement to this newspaper.
Makonnen added that the remaining CSSP funding would only allow for a small part of the entire initiative to be done and the impact would not be measurable as required by the bank’s policies. Additionally, she said the results and impact of the Command Centre would be realised beyond the disbursement and evaluation periods of the programme.
“We suggested to the Government of Guyana that the remaining funds be diverted to the construction of new police stations and the furnishing of both new and rehabilitated police stations,” she said, before adding that such type of activities are already part of the CSSP. These suggested activities, she said, would be in addition to the planned rehabilitation and remodeling of police stations currently being undertaken with the Bank’s financing of the programme.
