Dear Editor,
The Auditor General’s annual report for the fiscal year 2021 is out and not unexpectedly, a sitting member of the Public Accounts Committee, Opposition Member of Parliament Ganesh Mahipaul is falling over himself to grab onto the floating straws of this report. Surely, Mahipaul and Norton would relish nothing better than a full deflection of people’s attention from its sordid record of utter failure and rank corruption that almost bankrupted the country and crashed the economy, in just five years.
They don’t want Guyanese to remember the disastrous COVID hospital project which was commissioned by then President Granger as an empty shell, which drained over a billion of taxpayers’ dollars. A shell that the PPP/C government had to then retrofit to make the facility fit for purpose; or the Albouystown bottom-house health bond rented at a rate of $ 12 million per month; or the incompetence that saw them spending millions of dollars on an anesthetic machine for the New Amsterdam Hospital, which turned out to be a machine for sick animals.
They don’t want Guyanese to remember how they squandered over four billion dollars in surplus money which the previous PPP/C administration left in the Guyana Forestry Commission’s account. By the time they demitted office, it was all gone, the commission was saddled with hundreds of millions in debt and had no money to pay staff. Or about the $7.5 million of taxpayers’ money, they gave to the woman whom they used to file the Election Recount challenge; or the $12 million in legal fees they covered from taxpayers’ money for the private citizen who filed the No Confidence Motion challenge.
And what about the hiring of party hack Carol Smith Joseph as Petroleum Advisor to then President Granger, along with several other high-level posts for which she had no qualification, skills nor aptitude; and how about the whopping contract to their party hack, Larry London, to produce birth certificates that were intended to help them rig the elections; and the $25 million Prado bought by Trevor Benn for just $2.5 million from the very commission he was heading?
Mahipaul and the PNC expect Guyanese to forget the $16 million the party racked up at the state-owned NCN but never paid. They want you to forget the millions of barbershop equipment found in the house of their Parliamentary Chief Whip Christopher Jones, purchased under their SLED programme that was intended to benefit single parents and other vulnerable citizens, and the multiple tracts of state lands he was gifted. They are hoping that you forget the hundreds of millions in rackets that were being run among party elites through the Demerara Harbour Bridge asphalt plant and through the Guyana Oil Company.
Mahipaul thinks that by rushing to offer misplaced interpretations of the contents of the Auditor General’s report on the PPP/C’s first year, the eligible members of the Guyanese electorate who are poised to cancel his party’s relevance for Guyana’s new transformational agenda, would forget the $170 billion of capital expenditure under the Coalition yet unaccounted for, or the US$18 million oil contract signing bonus their finance minister treated as a gift; and worst of all, the disastrous 2% oil contract their Natural Resources Minister saddled our future generations with.
Sincerely,
Nigel Dharamlall
