“WHEN next you call the police and they say to you they don’t have fuel, you know who is responsible. When you go for your passport and there are delays or there are not enough passports, you know who is responsible.

This level of callousness and disregard is unacceptable,” Presidential Advisor on Governance Gail Teixeira remarked yesterday.
Teixeira, a former Minister of Home Affairs, was speaking in the context of Paper Four in Parliament last Thursday that saw the opposition voting against a number of quite “telling” provisions.
She offered that the opposition is upholding its position that any monies for the sector under Home Affairs Minister Clement Rohee would receive no funds. “They promised the people that and have abided by it. But does it make sense? And who is it hurting?”
From the Guyana Police Force, fuel and lubricants were cut. “For example, travel. This is to allow the ranks to carry out their investigations, particularly those that you have to go into the interior locations…and we have had a number of criminal activities in the interior areas,” Teixeira offered.
Expenditure was also cut for the maintenance of the machine readable passport system.
The Prison Service is “damning” in the sense that $45M for dietary[provisions] is now zero. “So what is to happen to the prisoners,” Teixeira asked.
The Guyana Fire Service $6.5M, in terms of fuel, is now zero. The other areas that were defeated were increases in security cost for public works, education, and health services in Regions 2, 3, and 5.
“To cut the security budgets of the three regions for example, who does this impact on? The security services of Guyana are feminized. The majority of the guard services employees are females and a large percentage of that are single mothers, grandmothers, and ordinary women who are trying to make a living. These arbitrary and vindictive moves will not hurt the government as much as it will hurt the ordinary people,” Teixeira remarked.
“Ironically for me, as a former minister of home affairs who went to the House on several occasions for supplementary financial papers to hear a former commissioner of police, Mr. Felix, vote against supplementary papers which, I know when I was Minister of Home Affairs, he was anxious to make sure that I kept the police force well fed, well fuelled and well provided for as best as we could at that time.
“I think it is time that the media and the Guyanese people begin to ask if this is the behaviour of parties who really hope and plan and think that they should be in government when they behave in such a reckless manner,” Teixeira stated.