Latest update April 24th, 2024 12:04 AM
Jan 14, 2015 Sports
By Edison Jefford
In an exclusive interview with Kaieteur Sport that appeared in the January 8, 2015 Edition of the newspaper, long-standing Director of Sport, Neil Kumar, told interviewer, Sean Devers that they have spent $700 million to develop grounds and venues in Guyana.
I used the third-person plural pronoun “they” to attribute Kumar’s comment because of his use of “we” to begin his statement. Here is exactly what Kumar told Devers: “We have spent $700 million in developing grounds and venues throughout Guyana…”
There was more to Kumar’s statement, which we will come to later in this analysis, but let’s deal with this fallacy first. When Kumar says “we”, it is important to note that there must be separation of his National Sports Commission (NSC) office from Government in attempting to analyse what he said.
‘We the Government’ and ‘We the NSC’ are different concepts that must be treated as such since the NSC should ideally function as a non-partisan sport organisation, devoid of any Government interference. However, this is not the case in Guyana.
Kumar was interviewed as an NSC official, who is a Director of Sport. I will show why this is an important point later. For now, Kumar has informed that the NSC spent $700 million to develop grounds and venues across Guyana.
For the remainder of this article, I will apply a procedure called Fact Check that the Cable News Network (CNN) popularly uses to deconstruct major political speeches, and other material in the United States of America.
Kumar’s claim of spending $700 million cannot include the budgeted allocations for the National Stadium at Providence, Aquatic Centre at Liliendaal nor the Synthetic Track and Field Facility at Leonora. Those projects were Government projects tabled in the National Assembly prior to their construction.
This is one reason why it was important to clarify Kumar’s use of “we” in his language. Kumar cannot claim monies Government would have spent to construct those facilities via the Ministry of Culture, Youth and Sport for the purposes of ballooning the NSC expenditure.
With that said, which ground did the NSC spend $700 million to develop? In his capacity as the Director of Sport at the NSC, where did Kumar spend $700 million? Seven hundred million is a lot of money to develop grounds; the state of grounds all across Guyana clearly shows a lack of such investment.
Half a day of steady rainfall completely inundates venues across Guyana, which immobilises the progress of sport since grounds become inaccessible. Just take a look at any ground in Guyana; it would become very clear that Kumar’s claim cannot be substantiated.
We had the perfect example in November last year when overnight rain washed out the National Schools’ Championships at the Guyana Defence Force Ground. There was talk of moving those Championships to another venue, but a suitable one could not be found.
This is a norm with Cricket and Football. Any rain makes those sport disciplines unplayable in Guyana, except at the National Stadium, which proudly boasts one of the best drainage facilities in the Caribbean.
Kumar endorsed Guyana’s FIFA imposed Normalisation Committee, but that Committee will face an uphill task in preparing Guyana’s Golden Jaguars to play Barbados with this incumbent rainy season. Kumar’s claim of spending $700 million to develop grounds should have annulled this concern.
We have the story of Guyana’s National Rugby team preparing last year in the National Park to compete at the North American and Caribbean Rugby Association (NACRA) tournament when it rained badly. Their practice sessions had to be completed at the National Stadium since there was no other venue in a state to accommodate the team.
When Fact Check is applied, only the Albion Sports Club in Corentyne, Berbice benefitted from any such financial input with $91 million spent on erecting floodlights at the facility, and again it must be clarified whether the monies were expended through Central Government, or the Sports Commission.
Kumar went on to state following his $700 million myth that “…we give the National Basketball team $3 million; the Rugby side got $1 million…”
Again when Fact Check is applied, it would show that it was The Office of the President, which made the contribution to Guyana’s National Basketball team, preparing for the CBC Caribbean Championships, and not Kumar or the NSC as he would rather have us believe.
This very basketball team, which Kumar misrepresents on giving $3 million, was locked out of the Cliff Anderson Sports Hall when they wanted to practice. Yet in his interview, he boasted of giving them $3 million, which was opposed to the truth.
It was the Minister of Finance, Ashni Singh, who gave the Rugby team heading to NACRA last year $4 million and not the NSC or Kumar as he claimed. If indeed the NSC gave the team $1M, we have no available public evidence of that contribution.
In fact, we have no available evidence of Kumar or NSC spending $700 million on development of grounds and venues across Guyana. Maybe Kumar’s “we” in his part of speech meant that he was talking from the perspective of Government. Even if that was the case, the state of venues in Guyana belies the spending of $700 million.
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