Dear Editor,
I refer to the letter by Mr Deonarine Persaud published in the Guyana Times on January 21, captioned: ‘Mayor Green is out of sync with government investment in the City.’ The Mayor elsewhere drew attention to this massive propaganda blitz that the letter seems to be part of.
Mr Persaud clearly is unaware of the real situation at City Hall and the government/city council relationship. The only investment the government has made is in propaganda.
First no institution can function without the three Ms: money, machinery and manpower.
Money being the most important, for now, I only wish to remind Mr Persaud of the following facts.
(a) The IMC group managed Georgetown after the PNC council resigned; the PPP/C administration hand-picked these persons to manage the city. It was clear that the intention was to persuade city voters to support the PPP at the local government elections which were due in the following six months. After the IMC was installed, the government made every effort to make the IMC look good, by outperforming all others, so the PPP administration pumped huge sums into the city – the occasion of the visit of Queen Elizabeth further allowed for a justification of this massive injection of money and resources.
The voters were not fooled by the PPP effort to look good and so the results were the GGG – 12 seats; the PNC – 10 seats; and the PPP/C – 8 seats. Some of the IMC members appeared on the PPP list of candidates and found themselves as PPP/C councillors after the 1994 elections. But the vital point is this: in spite of the money, manpower and machinery made available to the IMC by government, those IMC members – and one reminded the Mayor of this only recently – determined that in order to provide a minimum service to the City of Georgetown, the council needed to broaden its revenue base. In other words, rates and taxes were insufficient to provide the services required.
All of the proposed ideas to bring in more money to the council as suggested by the PPP IMC were without exception rejected by the government. Even the lotto which Mayor Green first proposed was shot down by the PPP administration. The rest is history.
So with well-oiled propaganda machinery (radio monopoly) the government has thrown the council overboard in deep shark-infested waters, and then with cameras and those like Mr Persaud they say how great and generous the President and the government are.
I avoid details at this stage, but remind the people that at the function commissioning the Kitty pump, Mayor Green made the point that thankful as he was for it, if we had a true system of good or shared governance, the Mayor and City Council would have been able to do all those things by themselves. Instead, we have a return to the old imperial-style governance – all good things must flow from only one source.
I will not address the issue of the electrical pumps and the President saying they had no intention of helping to pay the additional electricity charges.
Finally, I regret that Mr Persaud is justifying the personal attack on Mr Green by the President; the Mayor is quite capable of dealing with this kind of assault on his character.
Yours faithfully,
John Green
Personal Assistant to the Mayor
City Hall
