Spending billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to push dirty agenda

Dear Editor,
Mr David Granger in a message on behalf of the A Partnership for National Unity and the Alliance for Change (APNU/AFC) said our nation “is in a better place today than it was in 2015”. For whom, Mr Granger? Because when I look at the state of public expenditure between 2014 (the last full year of the PPP/C) and 2019 (the last full year of the APNU/AFC), I cannot see betterment for the people. What I observe are massive increases in spending for the 500 or so persons that surround the Granger cabal and thus the good life only applies to them while the rest of this nation is left with the crumbs.
From the table below (sourced from the respective National Budgets and the Auditor General Reports), one can find that expenditures on National Events went up by 200% under Mr Granger. Are the sugar workers, rice farmers, gold miners and bauxite workers benefiting from these increasing acts of pageantry and parade? Certainly not, so who really was this $1.2 billion spent on? Lights, costumes, parades, dance, wine and rum? Who were the beneficiaries?
Certainly not the people of Guyana. Rather, the principal beneficiary is a group of people who are mainly friends and family of the Granger cabal who have sucked up most of these expenditures. How unfortunate for Guyana that only one set of people can benefit from the patrimony of the nation.
If one looks at dietary needs, it went up by $2.2 billion between 2014 and 2019? How is that possible? What are the people that surround the Granger cabal really eating? Was it caviar? Was is exclusive foreign wine and high price champagne? What really did these people in the APNU/AFC spend $2.2 billion more on with respect to dietary needs?
If one moved on the cash transfers to local and foreign agencies, GINA under the PPP/C was given a subvention of $140 million in 2014; while it’s APNU successor (the DPI) was given $310 million in 2019, an increase of 121%. But history will show these are the people who had the audacity to cut the transfers to GINA to $1 because of a perceived bias in the reporting under GINA in those days. But history will illustrate that the reporting under DPI is 10 times worse than the transgression of GINA and yet they are getting over $170 million more to misbehave and discriminate even more? This Granger Group has turned rationality on its head as it seeks to deceive the people with subterfuge. And the same story populates the entire theme around the subventions from the taxpayers to other local and international organisations. The documents will show that these subventions went up by 113% or $25.8 billion between 2014 under the PPP/C and 2019 under the APNU.
Organisations like the Gaming Authority saw their subvention increased by some $30 million during this period while other vital organisations like the HOPE Coconut Estate saw their subvention increasing by a meagre $3 million. I wonder what the priority of the Granger cabal is. Gambling or expanding the vital traditional productive sectors like our coconut industry?
But one of the biggest shocks and best kept secrets in Guyana is the vastness of their spying operations by way of the National Data Management Authority (NDMA). The NDMA saw their subvention increase to $1.847 million in 2019 from $33 million in 2014? Does it cost this much to spy on the nation? The mission of the NDMA is to “deliver government services using the Internet” but to date, this nation has not benefited from any of these E-Services. All this organisation has done was to spy on the people of this country on a mass scale that resembles an operation out of North Korea.
To date, there is no E-Government Administration and no E-Government Services, but what this nation has seen are massive projects geared to violate the privacy of the people by way of a massive cybersecurity programme using a foreign company (from a non-democratic nation in Asia). Their primary mission is to hack into people’s personal data and use it to push them into submission. But also they are spending hundreds of millions on pushing out fake news on social media Facebook in an attempt to stain their political opponent as we are seeing today. I was able to look at a few of these advertisement geared at the PPP/C Presidential Candidate that are dishonest and totally indecent. Yet, these people who claim that they are decent and honest are the intellectual authors behind these operations and are prepared to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money to push their dirty agenda. Where are the investigative journalists like Sharif Khan and Father Andrew Morrison?
In the interest of space, I will have to dig in more to these issues in part 2 of this correspondence.

Regards,
Sasenarine Singh