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Dear Editor,
Having reviewed the “victory” speech delivered by the newly elected leader of the Alliance for Change (AFC), Mr Nigel Hughes, at the party’s 8th Congress, I would like to address some of the factually inaccurate things he mentioned.
Mr Hughes argued that the current government has implemented multi-billion dollar projects without any feasibility studies. Specifically, he was referring to the Gas to Energy (GtE) project. He also proposed that all political parties should agree on the country’s development plan so that there will be no disruptions and changes in plans whenever there is a change of government.
The AFC leader may have forgotten that a feasibility study had been conducted for the GtE project. The study was actually conducted under his own coalition government, APNU+AFC, which to some extent helped the current government to make a decision on the project. Therefore, his claim that the project was conducted without a feasibility study is a completely false assertion. The study cited can be found on the Ministry of Natural Resources (MNR) website. In addition, several other complementary studies were conducted internally by the Ministry’s technical staff.
Returning to his argument that all political parties should sign up to the National Development Plan, he does not seem to understand the process of policy making. The current Government has presided over the development of several national development strategies, beginning with (i) the National Development Strategy (1996), (ii) the Poverty Reduction Strategy (2000), (iii) the National Competitiveness Strategy (2006), (iv) the Low Carbon Development Strategy (2009) and (v) the updated Low Carbon Development Strategy (2022-2030). All of these strategies were developed with the participation of business sector organisations, civil society groups, representatives of indigenous communities, Guyanese professionals, etc., and with open public consultation and involvement of the general public.
Political parties also contribute, mainly through debates within the National Assembly, and outside the National Assembly in the public sphere through a variety of media.
Contrary to the above approach that the current government has consistently adopted, the previous APNU+AFC government during its term (2015-2020) developed a “Green State Development Strategy (GSDS)” which was prepared by trainee consultants from the United Nations. More interestingly, a study of the document revealed that it was a “cut and paste” document of the above existing national development strategies, with various parts taken from all of the above documents. Once again, we hear the AFC leaders repeating the request for “international experts” to develop our development plan.
It is noteworthy that there are differences in the approach to policy-making between the PPP/C government and its counterparts, the APNU+AFC. One would understand that any national development plan should be developed in consultation with and with the consent of the Guyanese people, not by political parties themselves. And, as I have shown, the approaches adopted by the different governments are in stark contrast.
The AFC leader referred to a “study” he had done that showed statistical evidence of discrimination and claimed that the government had never questioned those statistics. This is another outright lie. The government did question those statistics and overturned them. I, too, have questioned those statistics and overturned those numbers, including exposing the study’s flawed methodology.
Interestingly, the AFC leaders promised to apologize for their party’s failure in government and to examine where they failed in government so as not to repeat the same mistakes. However, there is no need to reconstruct a post-mortem. The reasons for the failure of the AFC and APNU+AFC can be summarized as follows:
•dishonest,
• Political opportunism,
• Unethical conduct by public officials (case of a former minister approving the award of a government contract to his own private company),
• fiscal austerity, poor economic management, and incompetence, and
•Multiple violations of the Financial Management and Accountability Act and other laws and ultra-constitutional behavior.
It is worth noting that, as I have demonstrated here, the AFC leader has committed at least two of the above errors. They are: (i) dishonesty: I have demonstrated that he was dishonest at least three times in his “victory” statements; and (ii) repeating the unethical behavior/conflict of interest issues he was involved in, even though he has publicly stated that he will not take action on the conflict of interest issues at this time.
In summary, there is a conflict of interest issue, which I have written about separately. You would think that since he ran on the idea of “integrity” that he would uphold the highest degree of integrity, but this is not the case. I will discuss this particular issue in more detail later. In addition, the newly elected AFC leader was inaccurate and/or dishonest in at least three (3) instances in “his victory speech”. For easy reference, below are links to two articles written by this author that question research that he claims no one has questioned.
Sincerely,
Joel Bhagwantin
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