Dear Editor,
Hats off to your Sunday Stabroek columnist Ian McDonald for his bold on point and inspiring `Ian on Sunday’ feature titled `Something rotten in the State’.
For Mr. McDonald to add his intellectual mind and most respected voice to this issue in protest, sends for me a bold and direct message to those who remain silent or with heads buried like the proverbial ostrich or spineless citizens shamelessly ignoring the dangerous path we’re on.
Mr. McDonald’s comments were as usual sharp, crisp and to the point.
In another Sunday Stabroek article of the same issue I was equally pleased to learn that the Auditor General and the Transparency Institute of Guyana Inc (TIGI) have publicly raised what I agree as the abominable expenditure for the transformation of the former Ocean View Hotel into a COVID-19 specialised hospital. This gross misuse of taxpayers’ money on this project seems so very wrong when one considers its disastrous flood prone Atlantic location and the condition of the existing property not to mention the yet to be determined or defined ownership clause of the contract.
The Ocean View project is as rank smelling as D’Urban Park where prime real estate was converted into a poorly conceived stadium of outdated and inadequate design features and an equally poor choice of materials in the heart of the city.
Have we lost our moral minds altogether making corruption our guide and target in all we do?
Editor, this is not just about politics it is also about greed and disrespect to the entire nation which has been enduring these shameful projects for decades. These cannot be proud edifices to those who would have left them behind.
I recently wrote of a coconut drinker figure which dominates without logic the entrance of the Arthur Chung Conference Centre as another poorly thought out project.
We have brilliant minds in this country in all areas of the arts and professions so it kerfuffles me – to use a Guyanese term – why we fail to properly engage them in such projects.
Yours faithfully,
Bernard Ramsay
