Op-ed | Berbicians continue to pay for Jagdeo’s bad deal

By Imran Khan

Examples:
The Berbice “$8k per ride” River Bridge,
The US$187M Skeldon “Broken before it Started” Sugar Factory
The US$32M Alexei Ramotar Fibre Optic Cable to Nowhere
The US$21M ‘Fip’ Motilall Road
The US$58M Taxpayers-Subsidised Marriott Hotel

OH, for the heady days of the Jagdeo administration! Never mind the record-high murder and crime rates and the rampant corruption; the country, the PPP brayed, was going places with the Champion of the Earth in charge! The high point must have been the opening of his (and Bobby Ramroop’s) beloved Berbice Bridge on December 23, 2008. A breathless, unquestioning Stabroek News said it was the delivery of “a sixteen-year-old promise by the PPP government”. “Chairman of the Berbice Bridge Company Inc. (BBCI), Geeta Singh-Knight, cut the ribbon to declare it open and made the announcement that vehicles would be allowed to cross the bridge free for yesterday amid loud cheering from the gathering.”
Bharrat was ebullient! He mentioned that the “farmer from Black Bush Polder would no longer have to sell his produce to the middleman who, after getting the supplies on the ferry, would eventually enjoy the profit at the market.”

And he said he was relieved that when he visits Berbice he would no longer have to answer questions about when the bridge would be completed, noting that he would have to deal instead with the question of the completion of the Skeldon Sugar Modernisation Project. Yes, another of his follies even as he mentioned more: “Meantime, Jagdeo said more roads would have to be built into the intermediate savannahs to bring more land into production. A deep-water harbour which would cut the cost of freight is also needed, he said. He mentioned too that “government needs to put in infrastructure such as fibre-optic cables to slash the cost of bandwidth.”

In hindsight, the Berbice Bridge was not in fact the high point of his time in office. It was a low watermark and remains to this day a symbol of the reckless spending on ill-advised projects that continue to cost taxpayers. The cost overruns on the poorly designed and executed US$187M Skeldon Project so ran down the capital of GuySuCo, that it became heavily dependent on bank overdrafts, and extended credit periods to maintain its operations; no deep water harbour or interior road of any significance was ever built, which may have been a good thing as even the $32M fibre-optic cable project to Lethem overseen by Donald Ramotar’s son, Alexei, was never finished. A total waste of money.
And let’s not forget “Fip” Motilall and his US$21M road to nowhere! The $58M Marriott Hotel Project up to 2017 still required Atlantic Hotel Inc to receive a US$2M annual subsidy. We are surrounded by Bharrat’s follies.

Now we heard yesterday that the Berbice Bridge Company is to quadruple the tolls across the river from November 12 to a minimum of $8040 per car and commuters be damned! The fact is, this government has been subsidising the tolls on the bridge as it realises the grave burden it places on commuters. When the 2015 National Budget was passed, the government took the first step, which ensured the cost for minibuses to cross the bridge was lowered from $2,200 to $1,900, representing a 10 percent decrease in the toll. This was a promise made and fulfilled by the government.

The true scandal is that Jagdeo and his cronies knew the tolls would have to rise to $8k for a car back in 2006 when the agreement was originally signed. He never told anyone and of course the contract was kept top secret. Contrast that with the transparency of this government; and contrast the haste with this administration’s caution and consideration, when it comes to crucial infrastructural projects, even as it cleans up the mess of the Jagdeo/Ramotar years. At the same time as its opening, someone even wrote a poem to the Berbice Bridge which the Guyana Chronicle published:
“Stretching across the river from the East to the West Bank
There’s a monument our pride and joy, the government to thank….
We know the toll we have to pay we think it is too high,
But we hope as time goes by, the cost will be reduced by and by.”
So much for that! Berbicians were wise to vote the PPP out of office in 2015; but this toll increase is a nasty sting, a cruel reminder of the unaccountability and wastefulness of that era coming back to haunt them. The coalition government, as assured by Minister of Public Infrastructure David Patterson yesterday, will do all in its powers to mitigate their pain.

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