APNU and the PNCR yesterday said that President Irfaan Ali and his government must take full responsibility for the problems in the management of public funds.
In a statement yesterday, the parties were responding to a forum held on Tuesday at State House where the President excoriated ministers, permanent secretaries, engineers and consultants over the state of public sector projects.
“It is with great concern and alarm that Guyanese watched the live-streamed meeting between President Irfaan Ali with government ministers, permanent secretaries, engineers, contractors, and consultants.
The President summoned the officials, we learned, to vent his frustration over the large number of incomplete and stalled projects across the government ministries. Guyanese were able to witness the President and the PPP government in their true colours: incompetent, disorganized and disordered, and arrogantly disrespectful. The public saw firsthand the level of chaos that has become endemic within the entire PPP administration. The entire public procurement system is in a planning and execution crisis. Hundreds of billions of dollars of the people’s money are at stake”, the parties asserted.
APNU and the PNCR said that instead of seeking to analyze the root causes of the problem and proposing solutions, the President insulted and threatened public servants who are least to be blamed for the government’s outright inability to plan and manage.
To fix such failures, a clean and competent government would have spent time to review system capacities, resources availability, its policies and approaches, legislation and institutions, the performance of supply chains, operation bottlenecks, and the role and extent of corruption. But the PPP/C is no such government, the parties said.
The parties argued that contractors who have performed poorly over the years continue to get contracts. “Persons with no experience in construction of large infrastructure continue to win contract awards through the … NPTAB. The monitoring and evaluation system has become politicized and dysfunctional. This growing wastage of financial resources through negligence, incompetence, and corruption is one of the main symptoms of the … Resource Curse. The more oil revenues the government spends, the greater will be this curse”, the parties asserted.
They contended that President Ali must shift his focus from finger-pointing and blame-throwing to confronting the real source of the problem.
“Let us remind Guyanese that close to $G700B was allocated for capital works in 2024. We call on the President to submit for public scrutiny a written report on the status of all large government projects. Where is the value for money of all this allocation? What are the checks to prevent an end-of-year rush to disburse the entire 2024 budgeted sums? Where are the reforms to the public procurement system? President Ali must fully account to the nation”, they posited.
The entire livestreamed meeting served merely as a political ploy and scapegoating tactic, they stated.
“The country deserves better. The country deserves leadership that is respectful, accountable, effective and puts people first and at the centre of development. The time for endless failures, diversionary politics, and massive financial losses is over”, the parties said.
