The opposition has been on easy street
Sep 06, 2017 , https://www.kaieteurnewsonline...been-on-easy-street/
The APNU+AFC is not anti-anything. This is part of its problem. It has failed, abysmally, to demonstrate in its two years that it is anti-anything.
It has not demonstrated that it is anti-corruption. It has had an unending string of scandals, which makes the PPPC’s excesses look saintly. The Public Procurement Commission has pointed to an egregious example of the violation of the procurement laws. The bond scandal, the Durban Park scandal and the pharmaceutical scandal are just a few examples of the missteps by the government.
When the government should have been upturning the deals of the PPPC, it has ended up racking up its own record of controversies. The very deals which it condemned the PPPC for, it has kept. The government seems to want to keep the Marriott Hotel. It has retained the Cheddi Jagan Airport Extension Project which it had blasted when it was in opposition. It has only reduced the bridge tolls, across the Berbice River, by three hundred dollars. It is still expensive to cross the bridge. The APNU+AFC has outdone the PPPC when it comes to missteps in governance.
The PPPC has merely done what any opposition party does. It has simply sat back and waited for the mistakes to be made. And hardly a week goes by that the coalition does not make mistakes. In fact, it hardly seems to be doing anything right.
Part of the problem is the ineffectiveness of the APNU+AFC. A strong case can be made out that managing the state has presented severe challenges for the government. It is not as if challenges have affected the governance. It is the governance which has been challenged.
The government is simply not getting it right and no amount of reshuffling and rearranging of portfolios is going to really impact on improvements in governance. Quite simply the government has been ineffective and it must ask itself whether this is a problem of personnel or a problem of its political and economic philosophy.
Sometimes when you have a strong performing economy, it can make all the other problems associated with poor governance fade into the background. The problem with the government is that while growth is reasonable – no one should expect that Guyana’s economy can over-perform – there has been little attempt to address the problems in the major sectors of the economy. There is talk about economic diversification but no measures to do so. It is all just blah, blah.
Growth is there but business is taking a bettering because the benefits of the growth are not filtering into the economy. This is one of the reasons why Burnham decided to nationalize the bauxite and sugar industries. The benefits of growth were being enjoyed by the multinationals and not by ordinary Guyanese.
The problems in the present management of the economy – an issue which the government does not even wish to consider – have compounded the difficulties of the government. The government is clearly waiting on oil. But unless the structural problems of the economy are addressed, this oil money is not going to impact on the pockets of the small man.
The government is not anti-anything but neither is it pro-anything. It has lost direction. One analyst has suggested that there is extensive capital flight estimated at over US 50 M per annum. This is serious cash. There has always been capital flight in the country but when this is now occurring on the scale with which it is said to be occurring and the fact that inflows are not as healthy as they once were and investments are contracted makes capital flight a serious issue. It a sign that people are worried about what they see and they are taking steps to preserve their assets.
The PPPC has not had to manufacture any labels for the government. The government has exposed itself to criticism by its bungling and its stubbornness to change course. The government mishandled the parking meter issue. It has paid a severe price for its shenanigans on this issue. It has lost support amongst the middle class.
The PPPC did not have to manufacture the criticism that the government was anti-people. This tag was a creature of the government which quite inexplicably went ahead and imposed a series of unnecessary and burdensome taxes on citizens. The fact of the matter is that there was no need for such increases in taxes because the government’s budget was much too large.
The economy does not have the absorptive capacity for that spending and what is going to happen is that a lot of unnecessary spending will take place to avoid the impression that the government does not have the ability to spend in line with its Budget.
The PPPC has not had to manufacture claims of the government practicing ethnic discrimination. This is always a thorny issue in Guyana and Government cannot simply dismiss it as political propaganda. The sort of divided society we live in means that it is an issue which must always be handled with great sensitivity and care.
The government did this in its early months. It was cautious in the changes in made to Boards but it seemed to have not exercised the same degree of sensitivity as its term went on. The imbalance in the persons acting as Permanent Secretary is a glaring indictment of the coalition, one it should be ashamed of.
And the ends to which the government has gone to hound persons in the public sector whom it may have considered as being sympathetic to the PPPC has raised alarm bells. Political hacks have been on the loose in some government agencies.
The attacks on private property, the assault on the Constitution and the shenanigans over the appointment of the Chairperson of GECOM have hobbled the government and led to concerns about a creeping authoritarianism.
The government scrapped an initiative by the PPPC aimed at providing incomes and training for Amerindians. The government replaced it with its own programme which has turned out to be not in effective as it should have been with the result that the scrapped programme is now viewed, by the indigenous peoples, as a God-send and its scrapping as an act of deprivation. You cannot take away something from people and not have better replacement. The new programme has not been effective and this has hurt the government in its relation with the Amerindians.
The opposition has not been effective. It has had it easy.
The government is the source of its own problem. But then again, as is the case with all government, there is an unwillingness to accept criticisms. The government will pretend that it is doing a good job. But it stands exposed for its ineptness.