Is the president the genuine article?

Nov 20, 2024 Editorial, News

…Editorial

Kaieteur News-Guyanese have a challenge before them that involves their head of state. When they take stock of President Ali, the issue is how much trust they should place in his words and postures. On Tuesday, the president called an early morning meeting and lashed out at tardy contractors, permanent secretaries, engineers, and ministers. The beatdown session was livestreamed to an audience of 145,000. No one was spared the public whipping that came from the president. What to make of all this? Was it a performance for the cameras? Was it the president starring in a production that he knows would lead many Guyanese, those who desperately want to believe him, that he is serious, and the first step has been taken to mend matters?

More than four years into his role at the helm of the PPP/C Government, President Ali has found his voice. We at this paper are still trying to decipher whether it is his true voice, or it is yet another instance of the games that his government has become very good at, and at which the president has grown from strength to strength. When this publication had reported on the chronic failures of contractors, senior public servants with oversight responsibilities, and ministries, the wrath of the president’s colleagues had been the response. President Ali himself has a record of flaring into defensive anger when questioned in a way that he doesn’t like, on issues that concern the Guyanese public.

We believe that, given the litany of late work, shoddy work, and the lack of proper supervision involving billions of taxpayers’ dollars, the president is engaging in what could be a farce, and at a rather late hour for his time in office. Guyanese, including many of his party’s supporters, are totally fed up with poor work, late work, and costly work, from which they get little long-term benefit. So many billions spent, so many deficiencies, and so many years passed, and yet nobody held accountable, no one made to pay any penalty. The entire procurement award system is an education in evasion and self-protection. Also, supervision of the many huge public works projects is questionable, part of a culture of lethargy and pulling a fast one on those paying for all the shabbiness, Guyanese taxpayers. When senior public servants, senior government ministers, senior engineers, and contractors who fill the senior bill because of the business they are awarded all have to be summoned out of their beds, it is certainly dramatic. But what it reiterates is that the whole public works system is under severe pressure and, to a considerable extent, leaks like a sieve.

President Ali has to know all this, yet he took more than four years to send a straight and strong signal. How straight and strong it is, those are the aspects of the president’s presentation that concerns Guyanese. This takes on added significance when one contracting group was conspicuously missing from the audience during President Ali’s version of reading the riot act. We do not think that it is unreasonable to assert that for over four years contracting and ministerial riots were the order of the day. But there was the president reading from his script about what went wrong relative to delays, and pointing his finger left, right, and center. The political stewards of ministries (minsters) and the chief administrative and accounting officers standing guard in ministries (permanent secretaries) were lambasted, laid out on the presidential mat.

Hence, the questions come fast and furious. What was happening at Cabinet meetings? What were ministers reporting about works in their portfolios? Where were the permanent secretaries and supervising engineers over contracts awarded and work done? Why continue to give contracts to contractors who have failed relative to timely delivery, satisfactory work output? Was the president’s gathering a mini-PPP Congress, considering who gets contracts and top jobs? The question that is sure to stir in the minds of many Guyanese is why only now?

National and regional elections are a matter of a few short months away, with the festive Christmas Season intervening. President Ali could have been doing his regular dance, with lots of sound but with the usual hollowness of substance.

Is the president the genuine article?

Editorial, Guyanese public., political stewards, PPP/C Government, President Ali

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Is the president the genuine article?

…Editorial

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Is the president the genuine article?

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