UNCLE DONALD CLEANING UP JAGDEO MESS!
June 14, 2014, By KNews, Filed Under Features/Columnists, Peeping Tom, Source
Donald Ramotar has a lot of mess to clean up. Sadly none of this mess is his creation; it was accumulated under the Jagdeo administration and is now hitting the fan.
All this mess was allowed to pile up because the previous administration did not wish to touch certain issues and make certain decisions because such decisions would have been unpopular. As such the mess was allowed to accumulate and now that its stench and effects can no longer be ignored, it has landed straight on desk of the new President, Donald Ramotar. He is the one who now has to take the unpopular decisions necessary to clean up this mess.
He has already had a taste of how difficult it will be to clean up his predecessor’s mess. When he took office, he found out that for years the electricity cost in Linden was being highly subsidized to the tune of hundreds of millions each year. The cheap electricity, as low as one third of what the average consumer in the rest of Guyana pays, led of course to increased electricity consumption in the mining town. The result was that the sums required to continue to subsidize electricity at the existing tariffs became unsustainable, not to mention how discriminatory they were against the other citizens of the country living outside of Linden.
This Linden electricity fiasco had developed under the Jagdeo administration. And it landed straight in the lap of the Donald Ramotar administration when he took office in 2011. When he tried to resolve it during the 2012 Budget, there were protests in Linden which turned deadly and cost the lives of three persons while leaving untold damage to property and to the economy.
The Linden electricity tariff issue has not yet been resolved and taxpayers are still being asked to subsidize tariffs in Linden to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars each year. The mess inherited from the Jagdeo administration has not yet been cleaned up.
Another one is now piling up. It concerns the student loans for the University of Guyana, a facility that is administered by the Ministry of Finance. Under this arrangement, students of the University of Guyana are granted loans to finance their tuition. It is believed that more than 95% of the students at UG benefit from this facility.
This column had long suggested that an audit be done of this loan facility to determine just how many students were repaying. It was observed that about 80% of the graduates of the University of Guyana usually migrate and most of those migrating do settle their indebtedness with the loan agency at UG.
There are Guyanese who take pride in saying that they are alumni from UG, but they never state whether they have paid off their student loans.
One of the reasons why some of them never bother to pay is because they have up to fifteen years after graduation to settle their accounts. This was a very lax regulation because within five years of graduation most of these graduates would have left these shores and taken up permanent residence outside of Guyana. So it is bye, bye for repayment of the loans!
Now we are told that things have got so bad that students now owe the loan agency billions of dollars. This mess was accumulated under the Jagdeo administration. And guess who has to clean it up? You guessed right, Uncle Donald!
The problem with Uncle Donald is that he is too much of a nice guy. He does not like to fire people. But since he will be burdened with having to find a solution to this mess, he should determine under whose watch it occurred and why earlier action was not taken. Then he should determine who should be held accountable and why steps were not taken earlier to deal with this problem.
It is now his problem and it is only fitting that since he would be shouldered with the task of cleaning up this mess, he should also clean his government of those who overlooked this mess and did very little all these years.
