Mr. Speaker, I Rise to make my contribution to this Budget Debate 2014 ,  as presented by the Minister of Finance under the Theme “ A Better Guyana For All Guyanese”

Mr. Speaker ,  sat in this august assembly yesterday expecting to find a few lapses of judgment in the presentation of the Honorable Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport, but hoping, in the interest of moving the business of this critical portfolio forward, to find some common ground upon which we could start that journey.  I was completed disappointed to see that after eight years with one person in the same portfolio, we are essentially running blind, running in place and claiming progress.

I’d like to start in the area of Youth, particularly whether the issues affecting our young people, our future, are being given adequate attention.

Absence of a National Youth Policy

Mr. Speaker, yesterday the Honorable Minister stood and promised us the implementation of a National Youth Policy coming out of “widespread consultations” in 2013 and 2014.  Permit me to refresh the Minister’s memory on his history of National Youth Policy consultations by reading the following excerpt from an article published under the headline: “National youth policy consultations in phase two”

“Stakeholders yesterday started to fine-tune a number of initiatives to respond to the challenges and concerns facing the nation’s youth while at the same time creating ways to ensure their participation in the country’s development… Minister of Culture, Youth and Sport Dr. Frank Anthony declared yesterday’s session opened and urged active discussion and interaction and pointed out too that the new programme was geared toward empowering Guyanese youth and improving their entrepreneurial employment and leadership skills.”

Mr. Speaker, that article was published in Stabroek News in January of 2007.  Almost seven years later, the same political party in power, the same Minister in place, we learn from an article in the Guyana Times 13, October 2013 that:

“The second consultation for the drafting of the National Youth Policy saw a positive response from youths when it was staged on Saturday at the Regency Suites Hotel, Hadfield Street, Georgetown…. The National Youth Policy, which is currently being crafted to address existing and emerging youth development challenges, is likely to be completed by year-end. Consultation began in September and is expect to be completed sometime this month.”

The only difference is the external agency funding the initiative – USAID in 2007 and the Commonwealth Youth Programme in 2013.  We’re in 2014 and there is still no actual policy document, no overall vision for youth development, although a draft I have seen makes no mention of the 2007 consultations, although they list a 2008/2009 UN-funded process.   The Minister yesterday spoke about continuing existing programmes to benefit youth and apparently he believes that repeating the same thing again and again with no actual result is progress.  I can also remind the Minister that recognition of need for a National Youth Policy actually started in 1992, which means that a baby born then would have come of age while the PPP has failed to implement such a mechanism.

And when it comes for mechanisms for our young people to have input into national and regional policy decision-making, there is the usual mismanagement and neglect.  Earlier this year we had Region 7 Chairman Gordon Bradford complaining that that region has been without a regional youth officer for the past three years with repeated calls to Anthony to rectify the problem going unanswered.  Similarly, Guyana remains without any representative on the CARICOM Youth Ambassador programme after several years.

Of course, youth policy initiatives don’t exist in themselves – certain areas of the overall environment disproportionately impact upon youth development and the budget fails to adequately address these.

Security

Nowhere in the budget, for example, is the recognition that Guyana has the 4th worse suicide rate Per Capita in the entire world, a national crisis problem that disproportionately affects our young people, and this was according to the WHO in 2008.  For this year, the suicide rate in Berbice alone is competing with the national homicide rate, and the young are disproportionately affected – just today, tragically, a thirteen year old boy was found hanging in Enmore, while over the weekend a ten year old attempted to kill himself.

When it comes to murder and violent crime, our criminal justice system continues to fail young people.  From the Sheema Mangar case to the Kirk Davis case to the murder of Trevor Rose, Guyana under this PPP administration is not a safe place for our youth and nothing seems to be done about it.

Mr. Speaker, the Human Services Minister sought to make the case that Trafficking In Persons – something that disproportionately affects young, poor women from marginalized communities – exists at some acceptable minimum.  The AFC would like to recognize and applaud the tremendous work done by Ms. Simona Broomes and the Guyana Women Miners Association for continuing to tackle a problem that has proven itself to be an inconvenient truth to this administration.

Young Entrepreneurship and Employment

Apart from being rid of our best and brightest via the continuing brain drain scenario, Guyana’s youth remain largely detached from mainstream development, mostly unemployed or under-employed.  One only has to obey the occasional traffic light and stop (when it says red) to see young men and women standing in the sun all day to sell you the daily news and a bottle of water. Young people are willing and ready to work but our Government must show faith in them and partner with the private sector to make these opportunities available.

I would have expected particularly in an electioneering budget, concrete programmes focusing on youth entrepreneurship from a policy level.  A multisectoral job creation programme that links GO-Invest with the Ministries responsible for Labor, Education, Industry and Youth would have been welcome but is of course conspicuously absent.

Absent also is an investment regime that has foreign investors ensuring that they create employment for Guyanese.  We had the Marriott fiasco of recent, and now Bai Sha Lin recently announced that in its plan to invest in Value Added forestry products in Guyana , over 300 skilled persons would have been needed; unfortunately , there was no indication that any could be supplied from Guyana.

Vitarna Holdings after acquiring Caribbean Resources Limited (CRL) from CLICO in Region Seven promised Guyanese that they would invest in Value added production instead of shipping away raw materials which rob the country of revenues.  Well after a number of years they are yet to keep that promise.

Sport

Synthetic track

On the area of sport, I will speak directly to the most glaring aspect of the Sports allocation although the Minister’s programme in this regard is as flat as the rest.   Mr. Speaker – I have noticed that throughout his career, one of Dr. Anthony’s favorite words is “soon”; World Cup Cricket audit?  Soon. CARIFESTA Audit? Soon. National Youth Policy? Soon. National Cultural Policy?Soon. Copyright legislation? Soon.  Caribbean Press books by local authors?  Soon.

In September of last year, the Minister promised that the track would be laid by the end of 2013.  In January of 2013, we have the Minister’s Permanent Secretary, Alfred King, promising completion of the project “sometime soon.”  Now two weeks ago, we learn that with the latest contractor paid, and costs inflated to multiples of the original winning bid two years ago, the track is yet to finish.

If it were the case that anyone in Parliament made a deal with a contractor to build their house, and that contractor kept inflating costs and changing the deadline for completion, they would stop all payments on that house yet the Minister expects us to approve close to a billion dollars to fund mismanagement, poor accountability, and on the premise that he will deliver on what has to be the world’s most expensive synthetic track “soon”.

Culture

Mr. Speaker, we can now turn to the area of Culture.  The honorable Minister spoke proudly about an initial consultation on Culture Industries recently held.  What is strange is that the only indication that I’ve seen that this meeting took place is a letter from Barrington Braithwaite, seasoned campaigner for cultural industries in Guyana, published Kaieteur News of March 9, in which he writes.

“On Thursday, Feb. 27, 2014 a meeting, symposium or workshop was held at Umana… Of course myself, Ruel Johnson and many others who’re earning and practicing Cultural Industries and are critics of the Minister’s miserable failings were not invited….  Minister Anthony, [and] Dr. James Rose – have all let the ball drop, they’re afraid to engage the creative community as equals…”

The Minister who urged in his presentation yesterday that people reach across political lines to work together, neglected of course to explain why a consultation on creative industries held by a Jamaican expert failed to invite some of the key local people involved in creative industries.

Indeed, creative industries represent the area of entrepreneurship most suitable for our young people to take advantage of, yet as basic a component of a viable creative industry environment, proper intellectual property legislation, the executive continues to drag its feet on.  It was laughable to hear the Honorable Attorney General speak with disdain about lawyers photocopying an exorbitantly priced set of documents that were externally funded and should be in the public domain when the government to which he is legal advisor not only refuses to move on IP legislation but embarrassingly facilitates the illegal infringement of copyright by opening tenders for pirated textbooks.

The development of Cultural Industries of course only makes sense in the environment of a broader national cultural policy.  Please permit me to read a few excerpts from a document relevant to this critical area:

(1)   “Guyana does not have a well-articulated national cultural policy and there is a great need for one to guide administrators, practitioners and other stakeholders.”

(2)   “…there is no up-to-date legislation in relation to archaeology and anthropology, film-making, copyright and patent and trademarks. Some of these are presently under review and it is hoped that the copyright legislation, for instance, will shortly be enacted.”

(3)   “”The completion of such a document – and the process of arriving at its completion – will go a far way in confidence-building within the Guyanese society. Additionally, it will serve to sensitize cultural practitioners and other pertinent stakeholders as to the role, function, expectations and obligations of important others. More importantly however, it would clearly and emphatically define the role of culture as an integral component for sustainable development as outlined in the National Development Strategy and Interim Poverty Reduction Strategy for Guyana.”

If the Minister fails to recognize those words, I can remind him.  It is from a 2008 draft cultural policy document commissioned by his Ministry in 2007, and never improved, acted upon, and certainly never implemented.

Then there is the value of culture in promoting tourism and cultural industries promotion.  Other nations in the region are seeing the tremendous rewards of internationalizing their literary, music, film and other cultural festivals while ours – such as they are – continue to be restricted, moribund and poorly managed.  While the Minister is trying to sell as his own invention the reinstituting of the sort of music festivals that used to be in place decades ago, the government of Trinidad and Tobago only recently put in place a programme that matches talented young musicians resident in the country with music producers and talent scouts in the developed world – that is the sort of innovation that is lacking here.

Which brings us to the issue of publishing Mr. Speaker?  It is excellent that Dr. Anthony should seek to recognize the work of Edgar Mittelholzer on his birth centenary and publication of his work would be welcome, half a century after his death.  The problem is that Dr. Anthony has refused to honour his promise to use the Caribbean Press to encourage the development of living writers in Guyana.  After tremendous public pressure, and after 66 books, the Ministry announced early last month that two books of poetry by resident authors would be launched “soon” and that the books were in country – we have yet to see them launched despite the Minister hosting a World Poetry Day event only recently.  The Minister speaks of some 40 books being slated for publication yet he cannot account for the books he says have been delivered to Guyana and have been distributed to schools.  Additionally, we have a publication mechanism in place, making decisions on taxpayer money for which there is no independent accounting and there is no board in place.

Mister Speaker, even as the costs for the sport facilities are wildly spiralling out of control, cultural facilities are suffering.  For example, an inadequate $21 million is listed as capital expenditure for museum upkeep when the national museum in Guyana is not only arguably one of the least impressive in the region but is currently falling apart and is currently understaffed, a situation the Minister is fully aware.  I fully expected in this budget to see concrete steps towards bringing all such facilities in line with International Council on Museums Standards but we find a paltry sum allocated, clearly indicative of the administration’s de facto policy on preserving our collective heritage.

Sports and Arts Development Fund

Mr. Speaker, one worrying recurring allocation over the past five years has been the Sport and Arts Development Fund to the tune of $100 million.  That this is listed under subventions to other organizations has been particularly troublesome since it creates the impression that the fund can be accessed by independent organizations when in fact every area of funding in 2012 was for government-managed initiatives including Carifesta participation and the Caribbean Press, which has attracted more than enough controversy over the past year to warrant far greater introspection.

For example, last year the Minister stated that $9.25 was allocated form “Film” yet CineGuyana, the entity originally established by government but now an NGO has not received a cent since the original funding in 2010, the year before elections.  Now the Minister suddenly sees the need to start over, piggybacking on the Loyola Documentary film festival instead of building upon the gains of the government’s original programme, unless of course CineGuyana’s original funding was just electioneering.

The listing of the fund under subventions to other organizations is completely misleading since the money appears to be spent by the Ministry itself and without the direction of a management mechanism as such a fund, properly constituted, should ideally be.   The Minister comes to this assembly yet another year without any progress on his promise last year to ensure that the Fund would be properly constituted, and with no clear indication that the $94 million he spent was value for money, and that it worked as an actual fund to benefit local individuals and organizations on a clear and transparent basis.  Who benefited from that money, and what did it achieve with regard to development of either sports or the arts?

Conclusion

The PPP executive and its supporters with vested interests have sought to stress the “continuity” of the budget as a good thing.  But if it is “continuity” of poor vision, poor management and completely poor accountability, then this entire Parliament, not just the opposition majority, has a duty to ensure that this sort of continuity is brought to an abrupt end.

The Culture, Youth and Sport portfolio, despite having what you would presume is the advantage of an eight-year continuity of leadership and institutional direction, has been visionless, stagnated and completely without innovation.

Mr. Speaker, I agree with one thing the Minister said yesterday – “people are tired with the politics of frustration”. The youth are tired of being promised a culture policy one year and then seven years after there is none in place.  Artistic entrepreneurs are tired that a proper national cultural policy environment is being ignored, with the government refusing to honour its own promises to look at intellectual property legislation.  Sportsmen and women are tired of haphazard management, poor recognition and political intrusion.  To paraphrase one popular song, people fed up of the same thing over and over, over and over, and yet that same thing is what the Minister is offering. Reply Forward

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