A FARCICAL post on the People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R) Facebook page caught my attention last week. It was headlined “Lest we forget.” Curious about what the PNC wanted Guyanese to remember ahead of its upcoming Congress, I scrolled back a few weeks and found just two posts with the same caption.

One of them stated that between 2015 and 2019, the APNU+AFC government “built or rehabilitated over 25 pump stations…as part of a comprehensive flood management project…total investment topped approximately G$7B.” The other post was a reminder about a bridge that was built during the tumultuous tenure of a wonky coalition.

Under the PPP, these projects would have amounted to three times as much due to corruption, shoddy work, and incompetence,” read the first post. It’s the warped reasoning of a desperate group of politicians floundering about aimlessly, as V.P. Bharrat Jagdeo has often described the state of the country’s opposition party.

Since the “lest we forget” posts stopped at two, I thought I’d throw a bone at the PNC/R social media wizards by suggesting a few items we Guyanese just can’t afford to forget.

“Lest we forget” the PNC’s D’Urban Park debacle. I drive past the prime real estate at least twice a day to and from work and I agree with the Minister of Public Works, Juan Edgill, it’s an eye-sore. Launched as a big-ticket item after APNU+AFC took office in 2015, the park is now a grazing pasture for donkeys, and horses and home to wood ants and vagrants. The Audit Office of Guyana (AOG) found that $1.1 billion was allegedly spent on the project, but the auditor can’t seem to locate documents that would account for how $70.6M was spent. In 2020, the AOG called on the police to investigate.

“Lest we forget” the $500M that APNU+AFC disbursed to Homestretch Development Inc. (HDI) which then mysteriously vanished. In 2018, the AOG wrote to the Ministry of Public Infrastructure seeking answers. The Ministry wrote back and said it was not involved in HDI operations and that it had no documents to turn over. Again, the AOG recommended the Guyana Police Force conduct “a comprehensive investigation.”

Shortly after coming into office, President Irfaan Ali pressed for answers. The AOG then discovered that a further $36.5M was taken from the Lotto Fund and allegedly pumped into the D’Urban Park project. But get this, no payment vouchers were presented to auditors for the transaction.

“Lest we forget” that APNU+AFC spent $2 billion on ‘dietary’ expenses, i.e. ‘food and drinks for party insiders along with gifts for Ministers and their children.’ By contrast, the PPPC spent $2 billion to provide nutritious meals for some 85,773 nursery and primary school students across Guyana in 2022.

“Lest we forget,” APNU+AFC paid a whopping $12 million a month to rent a house in Albouystown to store drugs. The thought did occur to me that my family could have made a fortune had we held on to our spacious ancestral properties in Albouystown.

And how can anyone forget the Georgetown parking meter fiasco? Smart City Solutions (SCS), the company that installed the meters, filed a proceeding with the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes in Washington, D.C. seeking compensation from the Government of Guyana to the tune of US$100 million.

In the next few weeks, a number of PNC head honchos responsible for these boondoggles will seize every opportunity to hurl unsubstantiated allegations at the PPPC. Guyanese should ask the men and women vying for leadership and power in the PNC where they stashed US$18 million that ExxonMobil transferred to Guyana upon the signing of the Product Sharing Agreement (PSA) in 2016. How can anyone possibly forget eighteen million U.S. dollars?

As for the 25 pump stations that the PNC’s smart aleck was bragging about on Facebook, the Minister within the Ministry of Housing and Water, Susan Rodrigues set the record straight earlier this year.

Under APNU+AFC the nation’s water utility company was unable to pay its debts, contractors were overpaid for work they never did, and water connections stalled because the company did not have meters, fittings and spheres. As a result, there were over 5,000 major reported leaks across the country.

In just three years the PPPC cleared the backlog and gave 97 per cent of Guyanese access to potable water. The PPPC is building seven new water-treatment plants, 10 small inline treatment systems and rehabilitating and upgrading 12 existing plants. The combined impact of these interventions will catapult the country’s water treatment capacity from 52 per cent to 90 per cent by 2025.