PLEASE allow me the space and time to respond to Lurlene Nestor’s letter captioned ‘Crime and corruption continue to define current day Guyana’, published in the Thursday January 6th edition of the Kaieteur News. In a style that is synonymous with those who continuously seek to downgrade the efforts made by the PPP since its ascension to office in 1992, Nestor’s missive is riddled with misinformation and unbridled propaganda.
There is no doubt that Guyanese at home and abroad look forward to 2011 with much anticipation, but a significant portion will no doubt want to ensure that the progress our nation has made since 1992 continues under a PPP government that has truly been ‘for the people, by the people’.
They have done so continuously at every election since 1953 and it was Nestor’s party which, for 28 years, refused to accept the will of these very people.
Crime is often used like a two-edged sword by Nestor and her party. On the one hand, they offer condemnatory remarks in an attempt to score cheap political points while giving solace to these very acts through the usual means.
Isn’t it a signal of support when the then Leader of the Opposition and PNCR attends the funeral of Guyana’s then most wanted criminal who was killed after he held off the security forces for eleven hours during a gunfire exchange?
What is Lurlene Nestor’s take on the draping of the coffin of this criminal with the Golden Arrowhead in the presence of her party’s leader?
It is on record that Ronald Waddel, a former PNCR Member of Parliament, was ordered killed by Roger Khan after it was learnt that he was one of the intellectual authors of the Buxton/Agricola gang of bandits.
Today, our country still suffers as a result of the unprecedented wave of terror unleashed by those ‘freedom/African resistance fighters’ who made Buxton and Agricola their safe haven.
As for her comments on corruption, Nestor needs to remind herself that for years her party, while in government, denied us the very Auditor General’s report which, according to her “consistently reminded us of this state of affairs”.
In the process they institutionalised corruption and racked up in excess of US$2B in external debt. Upon its accession to office in October 1992, the PPP/Civic Government inherited one of the poorest and most heavily indebted countries in the hemisphere with:
1. Over 90 percent of revenue being used to service external debt;
2. Over 60 percent of the population living below the poverty line;
3. Severe macro-economic imbalances including a fiscal deficit of 25 percent of GDP and a balance of payments deficit of 47 percent of GDP;
4. High interest rates;
5. Runaway inflation;
6. Dilapidated physical and social infrastructure;
7. Lack of public accountability;
8. Mass migration
We have since moved a long way from those dark days with development in the areas of housing, health, education and the upgrading of physical infrastructure that is unmatched.
No amount of spin by Nestor will be able to deflect from her party’s failure as a government for 28 years and as the main opposition party in Guyana today.
Nestor’s party has lost a significant amount of its support to newcomers, the AFC, and is plagued by infighting, allegations of rigging of its internal elections and a host of other ailments.
Meanwhile, as herself and others continue with their campaign of obfuscation I’m sure that many of those youths who participated in the registration drive exercise she highlighted were themselves beneficiaries of skills training through the National Youth Skills Training programme, which in 2010 completed training of 2,304 persons from the National Training Project for Youth Empowerment alone.
The latter project has been responsible for the training and certification at the semi-skilled level of 2,922 youths up to the first quarter of 2010. Many of them would’ve also benefitted from this PPP/C government’s continued investment in education which resulted in our students doing better than any other Caribbean country over the past few years.
Over 30% of our students got five subjects with grades 1-3 while in Barbados the comparable figure is 13% and Jamaica 17%. 400 of our students passed ten subjects at one sitting. While at one sitting we got the best overall result – 14 grade ones, the prize for the best science student and the prize for the best business student, an achievement that has been matched by no other Caribbean country. This PPP/C government Guyana spends close to US$300 per child for education, a figure that dwarfs the US$10 per child spent by the PNC government.