Where is the vision to lead our country forward?

Dear Editor,
Agriculture Minister Noel Holder’s unbelievably frank admission of ignorance made in the media on September 26, 2018, may have shocked many “…so they have now apparently secured some $30 billion bond, which the Guyana Sugar Corporation (GuySuCo) management has not seen, which the Agriculture Minister has not seen, and frankly speaking doesn’t really want to see” but not those who have been paying attention to the A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC) maladministration of our country.
Editor, our nation expends enormous amounts of money and energy to elect an Executive President and his/her Administration; in 2015 we elected Head of State David Granger to serve in this Executive capacity, his first act was to establish a Ministry of the Presidency to handle all the Executive parts of his job. Granger undertook no sector of our economy, social aspect of life or other area as his personal responsibility, he created new Vice Presidents, new Ministries, new Ministers within old Ministries, new departments and chose to chair Cabinet without holding any portfolio.
President Granger has effectively assigned himself the role of ‘ceremonial President”; he had tea with the Queen of England, attends heads of anything conferences and of late, is available to cut ribbons locally. The Head of
State also held his third annual press conference where it emerged that he had not read the ExxonMobil Production Sharing Agreement contract as of August 2018, he was “awaiting a briefing next month” – the single most important document to ever affect our nation since independence in 1966 and our President had not read it. Quo Vadis?
Editor, the old adage of ‘actions have consequences’ is being borne out three years plus into this maladministration. Ministers ignorant of critical matters under their portfolio is the new norm; the action of hiring a crony to a top position and then hiring an expert to do the crony’s job has now duplicated itself at many Ministries and departments, most recently in the Department of Energy. How much longer can we, the taxpayers, carry this as our burden? This type of bureaucracy come with a hefty price tag, over 60 billion in new revenue collected by the GRA per annum and yet we cannot pay our teachers a much deserved increase in salary or our hard working GuySuCo employees their lawful severance.
Editor, President Granger’s only meaningful actions have been his unilateral appointment of a chair for GECOM; his signing of the Cybercrime Bill of 2018 with clause 18.1 intact into law; his selective, costly and mostly unnecessary Commission of Inquiries (CoI); his refusal to hold a necessary CoI into the mysterious operation that led to the death of Guyana Defence Force Officer Pyle, as he chased People’s Progressive Party MP Charles Ramson Jr’s terrified wife through the streets of Georgetown and his policy suggestion that the ‘Carter Formula’ has outlived its usefulness and calling it a “recipe for disaster” – all of these actions point to a care for retention of political power.
Editor, I must ask where is the vision to lead our country forward? Where are the policy documents, statements, speeches, indications?
When asked about plans for GuySuCo, Minister Holder referred to a State paper presented in Parliament. Editor, this paper is long on rhetoric and bereft of detail, sadly it is a characteristic of all APNU/AFC Ministries and departments. This is no way to run a country.
For I would much rather ‘Quo Vadis’ apply to comrade Granger than to our dear land of Guyana.

Respectfully,
Robin Singh