Good luck, Mr Manning

AMONG the many criticisms we levelled at the former UNC Government were its lack of transparency, its failure to account and its practice of awarding contracts without use of the tendering process. All this deviance, in our view, made for gross malfeasance in the conduct of the country's affairs, and the revelations that have been made since the UNC left office have fully justified our serious concern. The relief we felt when the PNM came back into office was based on the expectation that governance would return to proper standards of conduct and that a fresh era of transparency and integrity would ensue. Now, we are beginning to wonder. Maybe we were expecting too much.

It took a question from the UNC Opposition in parliament to learn the unpleasant truth about the five-month-old Community Environmental Protection and Enhancement Programme which, in a period of three months, has dished out $44 million to some 110 "companies", most of them fly-by-night entities, one-man and one-woman operations, a large number of them having close links with the governing party. Several of these so-called "companies" received upwards of $400,000, some collecting sums over $600,000.

For doing what? Establishing small productive enterprises to help in diversifying the country's economy? No, that is not the purpose of CEPEP; rather, these "companies" are all engaged in enhancing the environment, hiring gangs to do a variety of clean-up work. What is to be the fate of the Urban Redevelopment Programme we have no idea, but the CEPEP gambit appears to be nothing more than another make-work scheme, this time with "contracts" handed out privately to specially chosen persons. Precisely how these "contractors" are hired was not disclosed by Environment Minister Dumas in his reply, but judging from the list of awardees, it seems logical to conclude that support for and affiliation to the PNM was quite an influential criterion.

In defence of what appears to be his "baby", it pleases Prime Minister Manning to explain that CEPEP, operating under the Solid Waste Management Company, is a "private company" and thus not subject to the requirements of the Central Tenders Board. This dubious status, however, makes it very convenient for CEPEP to side-step the demands of transparency and accountability even though its $44 million payout comes from a bank loan which eventually will be met from the coffers of the government. When is a private company not a private company? But this, apparently, is only the beginning, since it seems that the Prime Minister has great plans for the new programme. In acclaiming the "brilliant success" of CEPEP, Mr Manning has announced an annual target of 5,000 new "entrepreneurs", creating the vision of a large army of workers clad in blue overalls, employed by private companies paid from a Government-backed loan, assiduously cleaning up the nation's environment. The main purpose behind this expansion, he says, is to "address the most important issue of race relations" which he saw as "the problem of the allocation of scarce resources".

We suppose we must now thank the Prime Minister for telling us all about this grandiose scheme which is based on his personal belief that dishing out money —scarce resources — to instant "companies" all over the country is an effective way of addressing the important issue of race relations. Since it started with Special Works under Dr Williams to the present URP, make-work schemes have been fraught with problems. Now the Government has created a parallel private scheme, confident that the problems will disappear, that tax payers' money will be well spent and that by benefiting from it the ethnic groups of our country will draw closer together. Good luck, Mr Manning.