After recently expressing disappointment at the Speaker of the National Assembly for not approving funds for members of the Economics Services Committee to conduct outreaches in alignment with their duties, Committee chair Shurwayne Holder has said that he will re-engage Manzoor Nadir on this subject.
Holder told Stabroek News that he and committee members have put forward requests in writing to the Speaker for these funds to be approved, but to date, these have been unsuccessful. When contacted by this newspaper, Nadir said he was unable to speak as he was in a meeting. Questions were therefore emailed to him. This newspaper decided to send the questions to the Speaker but up to press time he had not responded.
Holder said that Clerk of the National Assembly Sherlock Isaacs told the committee that the Speaker had to greenlight the disbursement of funds. The opposition Parliamentarian said that the committee had so far sent three letters of inquiry to Nadir, to no avail.
Asked what the next move was, Holder said,“I am going to re-engage the Speaker and the clerk on this matter because we have been writing letters requesting an update … and we got no response. The Clerk has been following up with the Speaker, and when we ask the Clerk for an update he told us that our request is yet to be approved. The Speaker is fully aware of what is going on so he cannot tell the press otherwise if asked.”
Holder said that like the Public Accounts Committee, the Economic Services Committee is currently chaired by the opposition and is the only active sectoral committee in Parliament, holding 14 meetings over the last year.
He explained that the committee had set out a clear work programme which entailed field visits to certain economic projects including the recently recommissioned Rose Hall and Skeldon sugar estates, and those involving the distribution of blackbelly sheep and brackish freshwater shrimp.
“This work program was first rejected by government members of the committee and has since been denied approval for funding by the Speaker of the National Assembly over the last six months or more,” he had said recently.
The committee, on the request of opposition members, also agreed that the oil and gas sector as a new industry which has a significant impact on the country’s economy must be added to the area of scrutiny, he related.
“This request has also been essentially blocked by the government and serves to highlight the People’s Progressive Party’s utter disregard for transparency and accountability in the oil and gas sector and, more generally, its attempts to sideline and undermine the Parliament of Guyana,” he said.
