Have you ever wondered?
April 29, 2014, By KNews, Filed Under Features/Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source
Each year the opposition parties express concerns about the system used by the government to procure pharmaceuticals. Each year, there is criticism that the system is intended to benefit one particular company whose principals are believed to be close to the ruling party and government.
This year, the opposition had an additional grouse. They were concerned that the pre-qualification criteria used to select the successful supplier were biased in favour of the same company which hogs the greater portion of government procurement of pharmaceuticals.
Despite these concerns, the opposition parties have never failed to give their consent to the appropriations for the Ministry of Health and for the Georgetown Public Hospital to which the majority of pharmaceutical purchases are consigned. Have you the readers ever asked yourself how is it that year after year the opposition parties have never refused to give their consent to the appropriations that fund the very company which they feel is unfairly hogging the supply of pharmaceuticals?
Have you ever asked yourself how it is that the opposition has been cutting and not giving its approval to a whole range of programmes but the very one over which they have been most critical, they continue to give their approval? Have you ever wondered why?
They refuse to cut the appropriations for the supply of pharmaceuticals over which they have concerns but they easily refuse to approve funding for the Amerindian Development Fund because, as the AFC said, they have concerns about how the previous allocations were used.
This is the excuse that the AFC used to deny approval of funds for the Amerindian Development Fund. They are saying they had concerns. Well, they also had concerns about how the monies allocated in previous years for the Guyana Sugar Corporation were used. But they passed it after sugar workers protested outside parliament. APNU had in fact indicated that it was not going to grant automatic assent to the subvention to GUYSUCO, but in the end it did even though it is no closer to knowing just how the six billion dollars is going to turn the industry around. It also passed monies for the GPL.
But the Amerindian Development Fund was cut because the AFC had concerns about how the previous years’ allocations were utilized and because they wanted a technical institute built. In the case of APNU their contention was that this was slush fund to buy votes.
No one however objected to the $10,000 which was allocated for each school child whether rich or poor. This seems to me to be a vote-buying measure. And I can tell you there are multimillionaires in this country who are going to go into their children’s schools to collect this $10,000 per child. But the opposition did not cut or deny approval for this. But they refused to approve of funding for the Amerindians even though APNU itself has been laying claim to the need for greater development west of the Essequibo River.
The AFC has attempted to deflect responsibility for the no-approval of this fund from itself. In so doing, the party employed some well- known methods of deflection. The first of these was to blame the government by saying that the government did not adequately answer the questions that it posed. But did the government adequately answer the questions and concerns about the purchases of pharmaceuticals in the health sector or about how the monies for GUYSUCO will be used?
The government was also blamed for allegedly lumping projects together. However, what the opposition has not told the public, though, was that this has always been the way in which line items in the estimates are presented. The government has not done anything ingenious in the way it presented its estimates this year.
The second foray was to say that those like Peeping Tom who had criticized the AFC’s non approval of the Amerindian Development Fund were misleading the public. According to the AFC, Peeping Tom conveyed the impression that all of the projects under the Amerindian Development Fund were being administered by the UNDP. Yet the AFC could point to nothing in my column in which I claimed that YEAP was being administered by the UNDP.
So was it YEAP that was the problem? If YEAP was the problem what is the alternative? YEAP is a far more flexible and better plan than the building of the technical institute that the AFC proposes. YEAP will do much more than the proposed technical institute which the AFC wants to be built. But if YEAP was the problem why did the AFC not come out at the onset and say that it has no problem with the Community Development Projects being administered by the UNDP and which were part of the ADF that was not given consent?
Whenever the opposition is cornered it usually finds support within sections of the media who do their best to put a spin on things. The latest spin is the implication that it is not just the opposition that is opposed to the CDPs under the Amerindian Development Fund. If those sections of the media are to be believed, it is also the government who is opposed to the CDPs. A tape recording has surfaced in which a senior government functionary is said to be telling Amerindians that he does not want to hear them saying that the CDPs are UNDP initiatives.
Well this is precisely what he is saying. He is merely trying to clarify that these CDPs while being administered by the UNDP are not UNDP projects; they are projects of the Government of Guyana which is paying the UNDP for administering them. But a spin is being put on this story to make it look as if the Amerindians are being threatened to not support the CDPs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
A grave injustice has been done to the indigenous communities of this country by the combined opposition. Instead of trying to right this wrong, those responsible are shamelessly attempting to pass off their mistake onto others.
As you the readers ponder on that, I want to remind you to also ponder on why the allocations for the purchasing of pharmaceuticals for the Georgetown Public Hospital and the Ministry of Health once again received the approval of the opposition. Why?
