AFC leader continues to demonstrate why he is unfit, unqualified to be presidential material

Dear Editor,
I am blocked from the AFC’s, Nigel Hughes and David Patterson’s Facebook pages; hence, I have to rely on third hand information. I understand that at their last press conference or whatever press engagement they had, that Nigel Hughes claimed that US$5 billion from the oil resources are unaccounted for.
The AFC leader continues to demonstrate why he is unfit and unqualified to be presidential material for Guyana. He is absolutely clueless when it comes to public finance, fiscal management and accountability matters. It shows how divorced from reality he is, how desperate, deceitful, disingenuous and devious he is, and by extension, the AFC.
First and foremost, the AFC’s reckless assertion can be easily disproven. In this regard, as of September 2024, the Natural Resources Fund (NRF) balance was US$3.2 billion net of withdrawals. Here it is proven that 60% of the earnings (profit oil + royalty) from the oil resources to date remains untouched. We have only spent US$2.2 billion (41%) thus far. And for context, public service wages and salary alone for the same period amounted to US$2.3 billion.
I wonder what is their obsession with only the oil resources’ earnings, what about the non-oil revenues and earnings from the carbon credit proceeds? From 2020-2024, non-oil revenues will amount to US$7.4 billion, that is 37% more than the oil revenues earned from non-oil sources over the same period.
Further, under the PPP/C administration, every cent is accounted for in accordance with the financial laws of the country, and every cent is audited as per the Auditor General Report, which is subject to scrutiny by the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) that the Opposition Chairs.
On the contrary, the APNU+AFC hid the US$18 million signing bonus from ExxonMobil in violation of the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act; they ran up an illegal overdraft of over $140 billion on the government deposit accounts at the Bank of Guyana that was unaccounted for; there was the illegal spending on the capital budget after the no-confidence motion between 2019-2020, amounting to another $142 billion, thereby bringing the grand total to $286 billion that remained unaccounted for by the APNU+AFC, and unlawfully expended during their tenure in 2015-2020.

Sincerely,
Joel Bhagwandin