Who's advising these people?

A friend describes the present administration as a ‘runaway train to nowhere’.

Guyana has suffered from over-reaching ambitions from Independence. The man (Cheddi Jagan) who had practical Ideas had been thwarted by the geo-politics of the Time. Many of his ideas have been taken out of context with disastrous consequences. It looks as if since then we have been subject to various administrations desperate for Success stories, embarking on schemes without apparently having the ability of ‘thinking it through’, launching some big and expensive project with great fanfare which only turned out to be a White Elephant or a miserable failure partially due to poor Human Resource management.

Sadly now seems no different, in spite of the numerous bad examples that at the very least should have stood as warnings about what NOT to do! I always find it instructive to listen to the common man about how changes will affect them – a lot of Taxi drivers are of the opinion that filling in the drainage canals to expand the existing roads AND packing with white sand is not the way to go and will lead to grief in the long run. Several men/women on the street feel unease about the large buildings going up without regard to Fire Safety and proper foundations—someone even claimed that an engineer/surveyor told her that the City of Georgetown is sinking!

The much touted emphasis on Agriculture got shot in the foot by the merging of Gaibank (– one of Cheddi’s ideas about providing loans to small farmers—maybe even before the Grameen Bank – check out the PPP manifesto – August 3 1957: http://jagan.org/0155.pdf

“THE PARTY PLANS TO ESTABLISH:

1. A system of agricultural credits which

will be less rigid and bureaucratic as that

obtaining at the present time. More money

will be provided to the Credit Corporation

for further aid to agriculture and industry.

Provision will be made for greater elasticity

in cases of non-payment of loans due to crop.

failure.”)                                                                      

 with the PNC ruined GNCB at the behest of those economic ‘experts’ at the IMF who always have the hapless countries’ interest at heart in any country they are ‘invited’(not!).Sadly it took the Germans to come up with a practicable AID system that encourages Farmers to re-invest back into their businesses.

In their quest to provide Medical Services -differing Medical Systems have been superimposed on the existing English-based one, resulting in a general drop in Standards and no accountability.

I rest my case.