Dear Editor,
My generation grew up with the understanding that those elected to political leadership are bound by the constitution, our tradition and encircled by honesty, propriety and truth. Recently, we were persuaded that with the acquisition of a Turkish ship and other paraphernalia we would see an end to a stressful spate of outages. Not so. At 9:29 a.m. there was an outage as usual without notice. The majority of us, who are lucky to have a generator, have had to utilise that facility, of course having to buy diesel fuel. I left home at 1:00 p.m. to attend a function and power was not restored until after 3:00 p.m.
In a letter published earlier, I postulated that any business enterprise or service requires three things – money, machinery and management. This Government, for the first time in our post-Independence history, has an abundance of money and therefore access to machinery. The missing element is the all-consuming M – management. If a Government is serious beyond its rhetoric about providing a credible service in the power and other sectors, they must overcome this high hurdle of appointing to key managerial positions persons whose pre-qualifications seem to be supporters or acolytes of this PPP regime.
Editor, the time has come when the suffering souls must no longer remain silent and appear to be subservient or victims of a well-funded propaganda outfit. But what is worrisome is that when journalists from the two major independent media-houses, Kaieteur News and Stabroek News, ask probing questions, they are deemed by no lesser persons than the top brass of the PPP as gutter-journalists. As an ordinary layman, through your medium, I would respectfully ask of the President, the following:
(1) How many generators were purchased or acquired over the past few months.
(2) From whom was it purchased and the total cost including fees for Consultants and Agents
(3) Having listened to the VP last Thursday and the question of Procurement and his Government’s last tournament on those in breach of Procurement and allied rules and regulations, we would like to know what mechanisms were used, to identify the source of these generators and whether they were new, second hand or reconditioned.
Similar questions about the Turkish ship, which we were assured recently would bring a halt to these disgusting inconveniences of outages.
On a lighter note, I repeat what a friend observed when faced with continued blackouts, notwithstanding the Turkish ship, that we may need to replace the P with the twentieth letter in the alphabet. But Editor, there is one small question, why is it that with all of this earnings from gold, diamonds, manganese, timber oil, that logic suggests that by now, the Guyana dollar would return to the old days when it was 4-1 or even 20-1. I am neither an economist nor a financial expert but I have been in the vanguard of the noble effort to put meaning to our Independence. That is ownership and control of our natural resources.
Today, thanks to some ambivalent ideology, we have nothing to demonstrate that we control anything that belongs to us, so we boast that Guyana is the fastest growing economy in the world. Yet because the economy is now firmly controlled by those who harvest our non-renewable natural resources they are the ones who are de facto in control and we are allowing a cleverly contrived con game to continue unabated. One simple example, the mighty conglomerates sell the products raw and refined in most cases and earn US dollars, pounds sterling or EU but pay their expenses and local personnel in Guyana dollars deemed local content so it is in their interest, with a weak complicit Government, to ensure that the exchange remains at 200+ Guyana dollars to 1 US dollar. So the old colonial type relationship, the experience with bauxite, for example, remains undisturbed and intact.
So, with these massive gold reserves proving that we are indeed an Eldorado, our illustrious President and Vice President, shout from the mountaintop how many new jobs are in the offing as a result of new investors descending on Guyana to exploit our massive gold and mineral resources. This appears to be the only benefit to come to us the owners of these precious materials. Instead of investing money and skills to establish a gold refinery, we are satisfied with being a colonial outpost to provide the primary products, with no concepts, no efforts of value added. To our young people, we must guard against and not allow any Government to be guilty of this unworthy abject surrender to the wiles and wishes of outsiders. This is what Independence is all about.
I end with my favourite quote, from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Cassius observed “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a colossus, and we petty men. Walk under his huge legs and peep about to find ourselves dishonourable graves. Men at some time are masters of their fates. The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we are underlings.” Citizens of Guyana, arise from your slumber before it is too late and we accept that getting 2 percent is acceptable. So we can be cruel to teachers while the noveau riche can afford to send their children to high priced private schools cementing the conditions to widen the gap between the haves and the haves not. Today, silence is no option.
Sincerely,
Hamilton Green
Elder
