A NEWS item captioned, “Another 200 land titles for distribution” relayed the information that Senior and Junior Ministers of Housing, Collin Croal and Susan Rodrigues are expected to distribute 200-plus land titles to residents in Region Six (East Berbice-Corentyne) when the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA)’s “Dream Realised” project continues in that region.
The event will be held from 09:00hrs to 15:00hrs on Friday at the University of Guyana’s Tain Campus with partnering institutions, including commercial banks.
Minister Collin Croal revealed during a CH&PA contract-signing ceremony on Monday that the event was a title-distribution and not an allocation of house lots exercise.
According to the minister: “We have published in the newspapers for a number of persons from Region Six to make contact with us. The titles are not new allocations made by us; they are for persons in the system who have completed payments, and the titles were just there sitting at the CH&PA, not being distributed.”
The title-distribution activity for lands at Eliza and Mary; Plantation No. 77; Plantation No. 76; Plantation Ordinance Fortlands; Plantation Kilcoy and Chesney; and at Plantation Mount Sinai had been left in abeyance by the former PNC-led Coalition Government since it took office in 2015 and is merely a continuation of the former PPP/C Government’s housing drive under then Housing Minister, current President Irfaan Ali..
The inaugural “Dream Realised” project distribution was held at the Providence National Stadium on the East Bank of Demerara last month, when 350 persons received their titles for lands in Regions Three (Essequibo Islands-West Demerara) and Four (Demerara-Mahaica).
Minister Croal at that event, averred: “We want to encourage persons to ensure that they receive their titles, so that they can approach the banks for their mortgage and start to build.”
Prior to Dr. Cheddi Jagan assuming office in 1992, destitution and hopelessness were pervasive in the existential realities and the national psyche. Owning one’s own home was not even on the radar of grassroots people, much less getting bank loans.
But Dr. Jagan was a visionary who always envisaged Guyana as a homeland where the possibilities for upward mobility for every citizen was an achievable goal, and simultaneously, inexorably, he, together with his fully committed Cabinet began an aggressive programme of re-planning, restructuring, revitalising and rebuilding the economic growth and developmental paradigm in the shattered, devastated, bankrupted nation, paralleling the legendary Augean stables, his government had inherited. Like the mythological Hercules, they succeeded in cleaning up the mess through eventually freeing up requisite funds by way of debt-reduction/forgiveness by funding agencies and creditor countries.
The housing programme and boosting of agriculture to effect home ownership and food security were indubitably the lodestars of successive PPP/C administrations’ people- empowerment drives, and has always been, although the needs of every sector were being concurrently addressed, together with facilitating the growth and expansion of the private sector as the engine driving economic growth and social development. Dr. Jagan had always recognised that a thriving private sector was imperative to the creation of jobs and the wealth-creation driver of individuals and nations.
Sydel Thomas of the CH&PA PR Dept, reported last week that Minister of Housing and Water, Collin Croal was, along with a team of regional officials, engaging residents of Zeelugt, Tuschen, and Parika on concerns relating to his ministry.
The minister said negotiations with agencies that own potential lands are being actively carried out to facilitate land acquisition for the development of new housing schemes. He related that the CH&PA has been in negotiations with GuySuCo, the National Industrial and Commercial Investments Limited (NICIL), and the Guyana Lands and Surveys Commission (GL&SC) about acquiring lands. Government has signalled its intention to distribute more than 2,600 land titles countrywide to effect the construction of 25,000 homes, as well as to create 50,000 house lots within the next five years. The minister noted that, with approximately 70,000 applications for housing in the CH&PA system, the ministry is actively looking at ways of addressing the backlog.
The challenge faced by the young ministers is that the number of applications continues to grow with new applicants daily. The Housing Minister said that since he took office in August, the CH&PA has already received an additional 1,000 applications. They are, nonetheless, continuing outreaches countrywide.
It is clear that the young housing ministers are exulting in the execution of their portfolio, and Minister Collin Croal verbalised his exhilaration in a Facebook post, i.e: “Oct 20 Awesome day today. Meeting residents of Zeelugt, Tuschen and Parika: Assuring them of my ministry’s commitment to improving their water supply, providing new infrastructure where necessary and housing opportunities for them.”
Under another PPP/C administration, dreams are certainly being realised.
