Latest update April 20th, 2024 12:59 AM
May 31, 2009 Features / Columnists, My Column
I happened to be at the seawalls the other day not because I wanted to be a part of the usual lime or because I needed to be around a lot of people but because I wanted to clear my mind. I was just practising something that my stepfather once told me so many years ago.
He was talking to me about the talk name syndrome that is so common in our Caribbean society but which seems to have reached epic proportions in Guyana. He said to me that if ever I wanted to talk about something and didn’t want to hurt people I should go to the seawalls and talk to the waves.
He said that the waves would take whatever I had to say out to sea and more often than not, when the wave returned, whatever it brought back would be so diluted that it could cause no trouble.
On this occasion I wanted to ruminate on some of the things that happen in the society. One of them was the Marriott hotel project. I was one of the excited people when that project was first unveiled. There was the artist’s impression of a magnificent structure, and besides, Marriott was the kind of hotel that Guyana needed.
So that day on the seawalls I talked to the waves about the deal and concluded that someone conned the Guyana Government. That hotel needed space on prime property; it needed an excellent sewage system and it needed good roads leading to it.
I pictured people going there and to the Pegasus in style and of course, the Marriott would have offered a change from the Pegasus ever so often.
The government must have been equally caught up in the project because it dismantled the office of the Government Analyst and the bond that stored medical supplies. There were other buildings there that had to be removed.
The government then spent money improving the sewerage there. I was one of those people going to the National Centre for Education Resource Development one day and having to jump over these monster pipes. A video cameraman was there to capture my attempts and he had a good laugh.
I remember the government spending millions of dollars, first awarding the contract to Courtney Benn then taking it back because Benn did not have the capability to undertake the project in a manner to suit the international investor.
In the long run, the sewerage project was completed and I heard somewhere that the investor bore some of the cost. Lo and Behold, the Marriott is not going to happen. That was when I decided to talk to the waves.
The government to this day never named the investors; the sod turning that was promised more than a year ago never happened and all the news space I used was for nothing. Money that could have gone to doing so many things went down the sewer and must be smelling like the stuff inside.
There has been no explanation, and had some enterprising reporter not ferreted out the fate of the Marriott, I would have still been here waiting for the hotel.
I then turned my attention to the wind farm that was to have been set up along the seawalls. I was at the press conference when the investor from Suriname came and unveiled a plan that had me counting the money I would have saved in light bills.
To his credit, he has not come back and the wind farm is still to be born. But the government had closed off the road preventing me from driving down that stretch of seawall if only to gaze at the waves from time to time. Another shaft.
I am not going to talk about the hydro project which should have been up and running by now. The last time I heard, the government may very well undertake the project on its own.
The Mayor and City Council went public with the fact that an investor out of Barbados was coming to take control of a section of the cemetery to set up a crematorium. There was the usual euphoria. At last the cemetery would get a much needed facelift.
But I should have known. From the time the investor set his eyes on the jungle he decided that he was out of here. However, according to the Deputy Mayor, Robert Williams, the man said that should the council give him a piece of land then he would come back.
Bosai came with a grand plan to move the bauxite industry along and to offer employment to so many. Bosai borrowed money from CL Financial – US$18 million—and now it is laying off the very people it had promised so much. It was to have curtailed the dust nuisance in Linden. I asked the waves if this is going to happen and got no answer. The waves can really keep a secret and no one is going to say that they heard Adam Harris talking the government’s name and looking at the repeated shafting it took.
Where is the BETTER MANAGEMENT/RENEGOTIATION OF THE OIL CONTRACTS you promised Jagdeo?
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