The People’s National Congress Reform (PNC/R) and the Alliance for Change (AFC) have expressed serious concerns regarding President Irfaan Ali’s recent live-streamed meeting with government ministers, permanent secretaries, contractors, and consultants.
This gathering, where President Ali openly vented frustrations about a growing backlog of incomplete and stalled projects, offered Guyanese a stark view into what the PNC/R describes as the true nature of the current administration: marked by “incompetence, disarray, and disrespect”.
The PNCR, which has been on the forefront demanding accountability and transparency from the government it says diverts wealth to “friends, family and favourites”, is now lambasting the president for publicly outing shortcomings.
It noted that rather than analyzing root causes and proposing real solutions, President Ali resorted to public insults and threats, targeting public servants who bear the least responsibility for the government’s lack of planning and effective project management. According to the PNC/R, this display of “juvenile behavior” was not only unproductive but also detrimental to the morale of dedicated professionals striving to serve the nation.
The party noted as well, that President Ali and his government must take full responsibility for these massive failures in the management of public funds. To fix such failures, a clean and competent government would have spent time to review system capacities, resources availability, its policies and approaches, legislation and institutions, the performance of supply chains, operation bottlenecks, and the role and extent of corruption.
“But the corrupt PPP is no such government. Obviously, the PPP is in a state of panic as the inflated contracts awarded to its friends, families and favourites fail to meet deadlines and quality standards and to satisfy the Guyanese people. Contractors who have performed poorly over the years continue to get contracts,” the PNCR said.
The opposition party added that President Irfaan Ali must shift his focus from finger-pointing and blame-throwing to confronting the real source of the problem.
“The true source of this crisis lies within the government itself particularly with its corrupt practices and with the ministers who have consistently failed to perform and deliver on their mandates. Normally, one would issue a call for them to be fired and replaced. But with this PPP regime, should that occur, they would only be replaced with political cronies just as useless and crooked,” the PNCR said.
President Ali and his government have also come under severe criticism from the opposition Alliance for Change (AFC), with its Leader, Nigel Hughes issuing a blistering statement on the state of affairs.
He said, “The ultimate admission of failure is when you parade all your ministers, permanent secretaries and their selected contractors at day clean before the nation, confirm and demonstrate their incompetence and inadequacies, then pretend that it’s not your failure but somebody else’s. At this point, there is really only one option – start packing.”
