Winning lotto…

…or using Lotto
Last August, with great fanfare – and not a little skin teeth and gloating at the PPP’s expense – then Minister of Governance Raphael Trotman carried on as to how they were going to be depositing all the monies from the Lotto Fund into the Consolidated Fund. He took the opportunity once again to rip into the PPP’s practice of using portions of the Fund for agricultural development and other public projects.
The PPP’s contention that the “ Development Fund of Guyana” into which they placed the Lotto monies – and from which they were spent – were exempted from deposit into the Consolidated Fund by ART 216, that covered the latter fund, didn’t cut any ice. So, also did the point that the Extra-budgetary Fund, as the Development Fund of Guyana was officially known, was established by the Government Lotteries Act CAP 80:07 since 1963. And that, in any case, the Fund was audited by the Auditor General under the provisions of the Fiscal Management and Accountability Act 2003.
That was all so much rigmarole, said Trotman sanctimoniously, intended by the PPP to throw dust into the eyes of the people of Guyana. While they raped the country in general and the Lotto Fund in particular! The insistence on placing all revenues collected by the Government into the Consolidated Fund is to ensure Parliament gets to review the Government’s spending. And this is what Trotman and his cohorts in Government were insisting on – after all THEY controlled Parliament!
But OHHH…what a difference does a year – not to mention being able to have some grubby little paws rummage into the Lotto Fund! – make!! According to the Auditor General’s Report for 2015, the APNU/AFC spent a whopping 5 million from the Lotto Fund!! Once again your Eyewitness asks, how come the APNU goose gets a richer sauce that the PPP gander?? And it’s not as if Trotman bought a Lotto ticket and won the money – which he donated to the Government because he felt guilty about receiving that 50% salary increase when Government workers and other ordinary folks got Larwah. Naaah! This was Lotto funds that those same ordinary folks fattened as they desperately tried to escape out of poverty.
This isn’t just hypocrisy to the max – but contempt for the people of this long-suffering land. Now when you hear, Dear Reader, as to what the Government spent the Lotto 0 million on, you’ll understand why they wanted to escape parliamentary scrutiny.
They squandered all that money on the wooden Jubilee Park that’s already falling apart from the wood ants attack!! After they assured “private donors” would cover it!!

…or losing marbles?
When you win the Lotto, it does seem to go to most people’s heads. So we don’t know whether the Lotto money used by Government Ministers like they won it has them reduced to uttering inanities. Such as the Minister of Public Security is wont to do when asked how he’ll deal with the crime crisis.
Early in the day he came up with a 2:00am curfew on bars and rum shops. He still hasn’t provided requested figures as to the correlation – not even causation – between drinking past 2:00am and crime rates. Then he came up with a grand explanation for crime – greed. Some grave souls held their breaths waiting for him to follow up on how he planned to reduce greed and so reduce crime. Not a squeak and those folks are getting blue in the face!
Fast forward to the present – he now advises Guyanese use less cash to stop robberies.
So in Trinidad, where plastic is ubiquitous, there aren’t any robberies?

…through importing chicken
You don’t need to win Lotto to get rich immediately. You can also get a licence from the Government to import frozen foreign chicken – even though there’s no shortage to justify removing the 100% tariff.
But we’ll never know their names, will we?