Dear Editor,
Mr. David Granger in a message on behalf of the A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance for Change (APNU+AFC) said our nation “is in a better place today than it was in 2015”. For whom Mr. Granger because when I look at the state of public expenditure between 2014 (the last full year of the PPP/C) and 2019 (the last full year of the APNU+AFC), I cannot see betterment for the people. What I observe are massive increases in spending for the 500 or so persons that surround the Granger cabal and thus the good life only apply to them while the rest of this nation are left with the crumbs.
From the table below (sourced from the respective National Budgets and the Auditor General Reports), one can find that expenditures on National Events went up by 200% under Mr. Granger. Are the sugar workers, rice farmers, gold miners and bauxite workers benefiting from these increasing acts of pageantry and parade? Certainly not, so who really was this $1.2 billion spent on? Lights, costumes, parades, dance, wine and rum? Who were the beneficiaries?
Certainly not the people of Guyana. Rather the principal beneficiary are a group of people who are mainly friends and family of the Granger cabal who have sucked up most of these expenditures. How unfortunate for Guyana that only one set of people can benefit from the patrimony of the nation.
If one look at dietary needs, it went up by $2.2 billion between 2014 and 2019? How is that possible? What are the people that surround the Granger cabal really eating? What really did these people in the APNU+AFC spend $2.2 billion more on with respect to dietary needs?
If one moved on to cash transfers to local and foreign agencies, GINA under the PPP/C was given a subvention of $140 million in 2014; while its APNU successor (the DPI) was given $310 million in 2019, an increase of 121%. But history will show these are the people who had the audacity to cut the transfers to GINA to $1 because of a perceived bias in the reporting under GINA in those day. But history will illustrate that the reporting under DPI is 10 times worse than the transgression of GINA and yet they are getting over $170 million more to misbehave and discriminate even more? This Granger Group has turned rationality on its head as it seeks to deceive the people with subterfuge. And the same story populates the entire theme around the subventions from the taxpayers to other local and international organizations. The documents will show that these subventions went up by 113% or $25.8 billion between 2014 under the PPP/C and 2019 under the APNU.
Organizations like the Gaming Authority saw their subvention increased by some $30 million during this period while others like vital organizations like the Hope Coconut Estate saw their subvention increasing by a meagre $3 million. I wonder what is the priority of the Granger cabal? Gambling or expanding the vital traditional productive sectors like our coconut industry?
But one of the biggest shocks and best kept secrets in Guyana is the vastness of the operations of the National Data Management Authority (NDMA). The NDMA saw their subvention increase to $1,847 million in 2019 from $33 million in 2014? The mission of the NDMA is to “deliver government services using the Internet” but to date this nation has not benefited from any of these E-Services.
To date there is no E-Government Administration and no E-Government Services, but what this nation has seen is a massive project geared to violate the privacy of the people by way of a massive cyber-security programme using a foreign company (from a non-democratic nation in Asia).
But yet inspite of all of this the local Guyanese media remain clueless as to what is happening under their very nose. Where are the investigative journalists the likes of Sharief Khan and Father Andrew Morrison?
ours faithfully,
Sasenarine Singh
