Latest update March 29th, 2024 12:59 AM
Apr 04, 2013 Editorial
The government keeps blundering from mistake to mistake. Sadly, though, when these mistakes are highlighted the persons highlighting these mistakes are roundly abused as an opposition element. If the medium highlighting the mistakes is a private-owned television station or a newspaper, then they are lumped into the category of hostile media.
If the people making the charges were the ordinary people then the consensus would have been that these are fanatical supporters of the government who would rise to object to anything negative about the very government. The consensus would have been that these people are blinded by loyalty.
However, some of them making the claims of media hostility are senior, very senior, Government officials. Some of them are decision makers and others are politicians who hold the highest office in Government.
No government likes to be criticized but where criticisms are due, they take stock of themselves and try to avoid a repeat. Governments know that to have their shortcomings exposed day after day could be very costly. It seems to be different in Guyana. Here the government insists on stepping from blunder to blunder and expects that no one would say anything because for them, to criticize the government is to commit a crime against the state.
The history of this behavior can be traced back to more than two decades when the new government appealed to the nation to give democracy a chance. Mrs Janet Jagan had kept repeating that Guyana now had a fledgling democracy and that people needed to give it a chance to work. People did give it a chance, unwittingly allowing some of the untenable characteristics to become chronic.
We saw the splitting of contracts to allow for the government to ignore the tender process and to make allocations to people who are desirous of being rewarded by the government. There were such actions in the award of pharmaceutical contracts worth billions of dollars. When this was exposed the government denied wrongdoing. It took years after the discovery before there was any change in the situation but by then a few people had been financially fortified.
Having corrected that issue one would have expected the government to operate under the rule of law but this must have been too heavy a task. There has been the pursuit of projects that appeared to be questionable from the start. Indeed the government did say that it wanted to make sugar competitive and to do this it needed an ultra-modern sugar factory.
This factory became the most expensive project to be undertaken by the Guyana Government. Two years after its completion the factory is still not performing as it should. In fact, to describe it as problem plagued would be an understatement. Needless to say there have been criticisms of the contract and with good reason.
The Enmore sugar bagging plant was another questionable project. An examination of the project revealed that it was too costly. The government denied this charge and then argued that the money was spent on other related things and not on the bagging plant alone.
Since then one is left to wonder whether the Enmore plant is indeed serving the purpose of giving Guyana value added for its sugar. And to make matters worse, the government is keeping the factory under wraps as though to provide any further exposure.
The most recent criticism surrounds the move to commandeer a community playground for the erection of a tower. The government not so long ago removed a tower from that location because it was said to have been in the flight path of planes using Ogle airport. Bharrat Jagdeo and some other people have since built some upscale houses there. There must be something wrong with the government’s perception of the people it leads.
Shortly before this recent blunder the government had awarded radio frequencies to people who are known to be his friends and his relatives in a clear case of nepotism.
Why should the people not criticize these obvious unpleasant and dictatorial actions? But the government is unfazed. It simply keeps doing undemocratic things and appears not to care about the public perception of its actions.
THIS IDIOT TELLING GUYANA WE HAVE NO SAY IN THE 50% PROFIT SHARING AGREEMENT WE HAVE WITH EXXON.
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