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Mar 15, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom
Kaieteur News – During the recent International Energy Conference, the Prime Minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Dr Ralph Gonsalves sounded some warnings to Guyana about the dangers of spending our oil wealth on the wrong things. He spoke about the need to address social problems.
Guyana needs not look further than Trinidad and Tobago to learn how misplaced spending priorities and the failure to address social woes can affect a country’s future. When money was flowing Trinidadians began importing expensive motor vehicles; almost every home had a vehicle.
As a consequence, enormous pressures were placed on the existing road networks, and this was done to the extent that billions of dollars were invested in building highways, overpasses and even more highways and overpasses. All of this has been to no effect because the rate of building new highways still could not keep up with the rate of increase of motor vehicles. Today, it is still a nightmare to get into Port of Spain during the peak hours. The government was forced to introduce fast ferries but still has not alleviated the problem.
Trinidad should have invested in light rails and a different sort of mass transport system to move its citizens around rather than trying to continuously build roads, highways and overpasses to be constantly chasing after and increasing the increasing number of road vehicles. Burnham admitted that it was mistake to close the local railway. But of course it was losing money. Trinidad’s road construction experience serves as an important lesson for Guyana, especially when you hear the President and his Ministers speak about the transformative road projects which are being undertaken and when you see the sort of massive spending in building roads even before all of the existing roads have been improved.
Things would not have been that bad had there been proper planning. When, for example, the new fire station was being constructed next door to the National Sports Hall, no one seems to have considered that whenever there is a major event at that facility, the cars are all parked along the roadway sometimes two abreast. Parking at that facility is woefully inadequate. Yet instead of shifting the fire station further west, and making provision for increased parking, the fire station was built on the land adjoining the National Sports Hall.
The government proposes to expand the Corentyne Main Road. It is obvious it has not learnt anything from the experience of the widening of the East Coast Public Road where given the settlement patterns it would have been better to build a new circular road connecting to the back of the villages rather than widening an already dangerous public road. Guyanese have to brace themselves for a steep increase in road traffic accidents and deaths given government’s obtuse thinking on road transport development.
The other major lesson we can learn from Trinidad and Tobago is about crime. The increased in oil spending did not reduce inequality in Trinidad and Tobago and sufficient attention was not paid to the likely problems of rapid modernization. As such it was easy for drug-related and gang related crimes to take root in that country. Today, Trinidad and Tobago is the crime capital of the Caribbean. The government of Guyana has been highlighting the rapid pace of economic spending. But sometimes, it is best to moderate the pace so as to control social ills and ensuring that greater attention is paid to issues such as poverty and inequality. Unfortunately, the Irfaan Ali administration has no specific plans to address poverty and inequality. It believes that somehow the wealth will trickle down and inequality will even out overtime.
Internal security is tenuous at best. The government now has a National Security Adviser and by now it should have been in receipt of an anti-crime strategy. But such a plan is yet to be made public. It is important also that we strengthen family and community ties in Guyana because those ultimately are the ties and bind. A great deal of the social ills which afflict our country can be traced to failures at the family level. The inculcating of the right values in our children is being left almost exclusively to schools. But the schools face still competition from television and other influences. As such, schools cannot fill the void left by family and parental neglect. This has also been the example of Trinidad and Tobago. Even when their oil wealth was flowing the country’s social ills were increasing. Guyana should take note. Unless we do, we may have to one day ask if it would not have been better had we not found oil.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)
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