Dear Editor,
In any civilized society, a model village is not a futuristic fantasy, it is the logical result of professional planning that is executed by professionals. It does not require a President racing down the highway with a 47-vehicle convoy to personally announce a market upgrade at Skeldon or hand-deliver a letter to Mr. Tom Jones to tell him, here is a letter awarding you a piece of land to build your home at the back of a village with no road to access that land.
Yet, that is exactly the spectacle we have become accustomed to under the PPP. When it took 47 vehicles to carry the Head of State to Skeldon just to say the market will be upgraded, or when Tom Jones finally gets his house lot letter after five years, it exposed a profound truth: Guyana has become one big, embarrassing joke.
President Irfaan Ali is running around like a candidate for village councillor, not the leader of a country with more than 5,000 acres of idle land along our coastlands, ready for instant occupation. Meanwhile, our engineers, town planners, and public servants sit idle while the President does their job for the cameras.
Let us look at how the civilized world works. In Trinidad, Suriname, and Barbados, the Head of State does not micromanage house lots. They read the policy plan and let the professionals execute. In Barbados, Prime Minister Mia Mottley’s government pledged to unlock 1,100 new housing units by acquiring derelict properties tied up in family disputes. Does she race to every parish to announce each plot? No. She lets the planners, engineers, lawyers, and finance officials do their work; professionally, quietly, and effectively. They engage the estates, pay market value, transfer the land, and deliver completed houses with water, electricity, and roads to the people based on a system with set criteria. That is how a civilized country operates.
But in Irfaan Ali’s Guyana, we get a circus. The people turn up because we are polite, but we are not fools. We see the photo ops for what they are, a desperate attempt to distract and befuddle the people from how incompetently his administration managed the Transport and Harbour Department under Mr. Juan Edghill, their Chairman of the THD Board, Ms. Rosalinda Rasul from the Diaspora Unit and a CEO in Ms Yurlander Hughes who is a procurement officer, not of the grade to be qualified to be a CEO of a highly technical ferry company.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address supplied)
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