Latest update May 12th, 2024 12:59 AM
Sep 10, 2015 Editorial
For all the talk about progress and achievements, the international community is no closer to recognizing Guyana as anything other than a poor country trying to cope with development. Development is a measurable factor and when one uses the various criteria one finds that the country is still underdeveloped although the government considers the country as developing.
The various measurements include the number of doctors per population, the number of teachers per student population, the number of nurses, the number of schools and needless to say, the quality of the roads and other social services.
These things do measure development so Guyana when exposed to the scrutiny always finds itself ranked very low on certain indices. Poor countries are believed, rightly or wrongly, to be among the most corrupt. In fact, the analysts tend to suggest that had the leaders not been as corrupt as they are, then the country would have been further up the economic ladder.
The harsh reality is, there seems to be an absence of will among the leaders. In the case of Guyana, a senior functionary siphons off $27.8 million and transfers it to one of his overseas bank accounts. The matter is forwarded to the police and at the same time the government official offers to make restitution.
Months pass and there seems to be no effort on the part of the government to collect the money. Meanwhile the official is allowed to leave Guyana with his family. Repatriating the money should have taken no more than a day but the local authorities must have been unaware of this. One must wonder if they knew which local bank effected the money transfer.
That is only part of the question. We see that some private individuals rented public facilities and refused to pay. Needless to say, those exposed in this arena were people with political connection. This is just one of the areas where the government fails to collect monies due to it.
Tax collection lags far behind any development country. In fact, those in the developing country feel that theirs is not the right to pay taxes but to enjoy whatever benefits the state offers. The state of the city is a reflection of money being needed for infrastructural development, but it is just not coming from the people who need the infrastructure.
A few months ago there was a hue and cry about the failure of the various municipalities to collect garbage from the streets. This programme was stalled because the municipalities simply did not have enough money. And the money would have come from the taxes paid by the people. This is a veritable Catch-22 situation.
But the greatest threat to development is the extent of corruption. People believe that there was rampant corruption in Guyana prior to the change in Government. There is an asset recovery programme and there is an audit.
Given the length of time that these have been going on it is surprising that nothing significant has been discovered. Such is the case that the former government officials now say that talk of corruption was grossly exaggerated.
Yet, when one looks around at the local assets of people who had nothing before they entered government, one must conclude that many things do not add up. And it is not only Guyanese who see these anomalies; the people to whom we turn for money see the same things and apply stringent conditions to any loans that they may make.
The solution to the plight of developing countries like Guyana is trust. People must trust each other and must be keen to work for the common good of the future generation. Trinidad, a twin-island republic to the northwest recently demonstrated to Guyana why its development is not lagging.
Just about five hours after its elections it could have declared the results which were accepted without as much as a mumble. Life continued without a break. Not so in Guyana.
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