President Donald Ramotar says the decision to withhold assent from the local government bill intended to strip ministerial control over local authorities was taken because he felt the change was unconstitutional.

Ramotar yesterday also accused the opposition of breaking an agreement with the government on not changing the law,

Donald Ramotar

a day after the main opposition coalition APNU accused the government of attempting to retain “archaic colonial powers” now vested in the Minister of Local Government.

Ramotar this week signed into law the Fiscal Transfers Act, the Municipal and District Councils (Amendment) Act and the Local Government Commission Act, which were all passed unanimously by the National Assembly at its August 7th sitting.

Also passed unanimously despite government’s reservations was the Local Government (Amendment) Bill, which seeks to wrest ministerial control over local authorities and to vest them in the Local Government Commission. The bill, however, did not receive presidential assent, and no full reason was given by the head of state until yesterday.

At a press conference at the Office of the President, Ramotar said that during the Ninth Parliament, the ruling PPP/C—which then commanded a majority—and the then main opposition PNCR had aligned with an agreement and an understanding that the legislation in its current form was how it should remain.

“This parliament, they have decided to change it. But not only have they changed it, which is in my view unprincipled, but they have made it also unconstitutional to try and take the authority of the minister out and vest it into a commission and that the constitution is against that…that is why I didn’t assent to it,” he explained.

“We thought we had a deal,” Ramotar said, but he did not go into further details about what that meant in relation to the amendment bill.

APNU has stated that changes made to the bill would infuse local government organs with more autonomy than they enjoy today, including transferring powers which currently lie with the Local Government Minister to the Local Government Commission once it is established. By refusing the assent to the bill, APNU argues, Ramotar has demonstrated his intent to keep as much power as possible in the hands of central government.

Meanwhile, despite the assent to three of the four bills, further action needs to be taken to bring their provisions into force, according to APNU MP Basil Williams.

Williams, who chaired the committee which looked at the bills before bringing them back to the National Assembly, said the Fiscal Transfers Act and the Municipal and District Councils (Amend-ment) Act will not be enforceable until they are posted in Guyana’s Official Gazette.

Basil Williams

Further, as is mandated by the law itself, he says that the Local Government Commission Act will only take effect when Local Government Minister Ganga Persaud issues an order calling for it to be brought into effect. Until these things are done, Williams emphasised, the assent given by Ramotar means very little.

When contacted on Thursday, Persaud indicated his intention to give the order that will bring the law into force. He could not say, however, when he intended to do so.

Williams opined that there is nothing preventing Persaud from immediately giving the order. He also posited that the government should have no problem posting the bills in the Gazette by the end of the week, or this weekend the latest.

Referring to the Appropriations Bill that was passed, assented to, and implemented earlier this year, Williams said that it went through the necessary processes in a matter of days although it was more complex than the local government bills. As a result, Williams called for Ramotar and Persaud to move ahead on the legislation since it has already taken several months to get this far. Until they take these actions, he said, “We will continue to be on game street.”

President Donald Ramotar is hoping a new GuySuCo board would be installed in a month’s time.

“We are gonna make some changes at the leadership level. I hope—I can’t be absolutely sure—but I hope in a month’s time everything will be in place,” Ramotar told Stabroek News at Freedom House yesterday.

When asked if the board and management will have familiar faces, he replied, “I haven’t totally decided as yet because I have to decide with the new people that I am going to put inside.”

Ramotar reiterated that the current Chairman of the Board Raj Singh will be kept on albeit in a new position. “He will be there but his functions will change,” he said.

Singh has long been floated as the candidate to be the troubled corporation’s new Executive Chairman. This likely appointment has been sharply opposed by the opposition and other groups.

Ramotar said too that while there have been many criticisms of the current Chairman of the Board, it was not unlikely that a new chairman would not receive the same amount of criticism.

While Ramotar has stated that a review of the board and switch up was needed and proposed a deadline, he did not indicate that he has contemplated thoroughly how to actually go about reorganising the board. He did reveal that the five-year strategic plan from 2013 to 2017 is in its draft phase and that at the next board meeting the plan will be reviewed.

Ramotar, however, brushed off the importance of the plan, stating that it could not do anything about the weather which is currently affecting the second crop harvest.

It was only in June that any mention of a new plan was made during the signing of the 2012 Financing Agreement for the Guyana Annual Action Programme on Accompanying Measures for Sugar Protocol Countries with the European Union. The agreement was signed with a condition that land conversion was going to be a necessary component to receiving over $6.5 billion in funding from the EU to assist the struggling sugar industry.

The second crop target is 192,000 tonnes to make up this year’s 240,000 tonnes target and while it seems unlikely that the corporation will meet it, there has yet to be any official word from GuySuCo in relation to adjusting the figure. The first crop was a dismal 48,000 tonnes, which was a far cry from the 71,000 tonnes target.

The second crop harvest was supposed to have started in late June, but did not officially commence until the first week of July at Albion and later on Rose Hall. The troubled Skeldon factory, which had been advertised to start grinding for the second crop on August 5, is yet to begin.

Stabroek News had been told that Sunday was the new target if the weather permitted, however up to yesterday Skeldon remained at a standstill.

Stabroek News visited Skeldon estate last Thursday and it was noted that the rains had rendered work impossible. Not only was mechanical harvesting out of the question but for over four weeks Skeldon’s manual component, over 240 cane harvesters, were being shuttled to the Blairmont estate. Skeldon was meant to be the centre piece of a reform plan for higher sugar production but it has so far failed disastrously.

Project Coordinator of Guyana’s $3.1 billion e-governance project, Alexei Ramotar says that while supervision deficiencies have caused delays in the completion of the fibre optic cable-laying works, government has applied penalties and taken over the work to see it to the end by September, more than two years later than the first mooted completion date.

And he dismissed concerns of cyber espionage that the United States, Canada and Australia expressed on the use of Huawei – the Chinese IT giant whose technology is being used for the project.

Providing an update on the project, Ramotar told Stabroek News on Wednesday that while delays did affect the final budget of the project, they were able to recover funds from errant contractors by applying penalties. He would not comment on the cost overruns as a result of the delays. When this newspaper put the concerns of contractor Sam Barakat of Engineering and Construction Inc to Ramotar, he declined to comment. Barakat in a letter to this newspaper on February 20 had expressed displeasure at Ramotar who he alleged made statements casting blame for the delay of the project on Guyanese labour. Barakat said Ramotar should be the one on whom the responsibility falls for the failure of the supervisory works.

Ramotar however explain-ed why the delays occurred and what the project coordination office is doing to address them. “When we started we were saying that it would have taken about six months [to complete] but it took almost six months to get started because of the nature of the job and the requirements for specialised equipment. After that, it took some time because it was a learning curve for us,” he said.

Alexei Ramotar (GINA photo)

“The cable is laid…the entire length of the cable is laid from Lethem to Georgetown. However there were several areas where the cable was not laid to the specifications required and that has resulted in vehicular and bulldozer traffic breaking the cable. So right now what we are in the process of doing is fixing those issues,” he said. “We also have to do some other work mostly with supervision, to see how the overall work was done by the contractors and then we will be completed,” he said. He said that following the completion there will be an extensive testing phase lasting three to four months.

“We are also working on the solar sites since the equipment has to get power every hundred of so kilometres since the signal tends to slow down. You would have to boost the signal and shoot it out back. We are doing two things: we are adding more signal to be able to get connected to [more places such as] Linden, Kurupukari, Annai and Lethem and also to boost signal and push it forward,” he said.

He said that the aim of the project is to lower the cost of doing business in Guyana. He noted that one of the major problems ICT companies have is frequencies since it is very expensive. By using fibre optic and microwave the government aims to lower costs to encourage companies to come on board. “What we are envisioning is lowering the costs for government as well,” he said, noting that the project will eventually see the advent of cloud computing and other technologies.

“We want to see how the signal works, to see if it can do videos and data transmission, which require high quality signals. We also have to see how the cable responds to [environmental exposure],” he said. He explained that there would be the need to do brush cutting in some areas to prevent trees and shrubbery from becoming entangled with the cables.

He said the testing has already been started and will continue for the next three months or so. “When we started the project we did give the contractors the sort of equipment that they would require. We brought in a specialist to train the different teams,” he said. “Our major problem was the quality of supervision,” he said, noting that an external company had been carrying out the supervision and this has been terminated, resulting in those supervision duties being done by the Ministry of Works under Engineer Walter Willis.

Ramotar explained that the fibre optic project is part of a larger one aimed at developing the ICT structure in Guyana. He said that before this project was conceptualised, every IT company wanting to operate in Guyana had to invest in its own infrastructure, a very expensive proposition. He said the project will bring to Guyana huge amounts of bandwidth using modern fibre optics. “It will allow a lot of information to flow,” he said. “It will [make it] more attractive for inves-tors coming to Guyana,” he said.

He said Guyana is way behind in terms of internet technology and this country should be at least on par with Suriname.

Asked about concerns expressed by Canada, the United States and Australia about potential security risks from Huawei, Ramotar said these fears strike him as more protectionist than anything else. “Huawei is the biggest telecoms provider in the world. If there is anybody who should be sceptical it would be the Russians because they are the next door neighbours to China and Huawei is a huge provider of telecoms in Russia,” he said. “I can’t say what the American issue is and the Australian issue seems to be protectionism,” he said.