Trust Norton - AFC backs Public Health Minister
Alliance For Change (AFC) leader Khemraj Ramjattan says his party supports embattled Minister of Public Health Dr George Norton and believes that the nation should trust its leaders’ decision on the pharmaceutical bond contract.
While he believes that the APNU+AFC coalition government will “pay a heavy price” for its decision, Ramjattan is asking their supporters to rationalise the tough decisions the party had to make and to determine if the opposition was in their place, whether they would have done the same, and judge them accordingly.
“Well I don’t know what else I can say. I have indicated that indeed it is a sad episode and we are going to pay a heavy price for it. The whole arrangement here is, if the price is so heavy when comes the next election people remember this incident and forget all the rottenness that the PPP had done, then fine they can vote us out of government,” Ramjattan told Stabroek News yesterday.
He was responding to former Auditor General Anand Goolsarran’s critique of the “soft” stance the AFC has taken on dealing with government’s $12.5M per month, solesourcing of a bond to businessman Lawrence Singh of Linden Holding Inc.
Norton and the government have come under unrelenting pressure over the contract since he made disclosures about it after intense questioning in Parliament on August 8 during consideration of a financial paper. It was later revealed that Norton had provided false answers to several of the questions. He has since apologised and appealed for a chance “to do better” but this has not been enough to quell calls for his removal and for Cabinet to take ultimate responsibility.
Ramjattan has likened his party’s position of not asking that Norton be fired for lying to the Committees of Supply of the National Assembly about key elements of the contract, to that of a cricket captain keeping the members of his team. “Think of it like a game of cricket. One man drops de ball at a crucial point in the game. Wuh de Captain must do? Box the man behind he head, tell he walk off the field and call a truck to drive over him? No. We are humans and we will blunder. We are not a Cabinet of Angels,” he had told Kaieteur News.
‘Serious business’
But Goolsarran says it is folly for the AFC Leader to compare the two. “My dear friend and VicePresident/Minister of Public Security might have overlooked the fact that cricket is a gentleman’s game. It doesn’t matter who the winner or loser is, it is how the game is played. I have been in cricket for the greater part of my life. On the other hand, running government and administering the affairs is serious business. Public resources, indeed hardworking taxpayers’ funds, are involved. It behooves every government to exercise the greatest degree of skill, care and caution in ensuring that decisions made do not result in the loss of public resources, waste, extravagance, inefficiency and ineffectiveness,” he said.
“Government officials, including Ministers of the Government, must be highly skilled, competent and experienced in the relevant field and must at all times act in the public interest. There is no room for error where public resources are involved,” he declared.
However, Ramjattan said it was just an analogy and he would want to know what Goolsarran would have done if he “was the man in charge of the minister.
“We have done the subcommittee. The PPP would have never done that but we have advanced the stage in ensuring that there is an investigation at a Cabinet level and so we have forwarded in our government that kind of governance so we can investigate and ask and make recommendations, one of which was to apologise to the nation and parliament,” he reasoned.
Further, he stressed, “People must understand that we have what is called a democratic society here. Political decisions have to be pertaining to matters like these. Our political decision was to have an investigation. An investigation that led to a number of recommendations which we are implementing. The Minister has already apologised, the contract is being reviewed as to pricing and so on...they are all being implemented.”
Ramjattan, also the Minister of Public Security, believes that the populace needs to trust its leaders’ judgement and lauded the works of the Public Health Minister.
“That is where the political decision is. We believe that yes, the nation should still trust the judgement of the minister and still trust its leaders. He (Norton) has given his life to the country. As an opposition member, he has done a fantastic job in the Amerindian community and there is tremendous value in having a minister like that. Not because he did an error of whatever gravity you might want to regard it, that you will want to box him behind his ears and ask a truck to run over him. It is a political decision we had to make and we have made our political decision,” he argued.
“I am urging you to take this into consideration: Would the PPP have done that? When we had Irfaan Ali against the wall in relation to the $4B at GuySuCo, the (Winston) Brassington deals, about so many other contracts that they did not offer and when (Ranjisinghi) Ramroop was getting all the contracts for pharmaceuticals? I am urging Goolsarran to understand that we were banging our heads against a firewall, a literal concrete wall. As a matter of fact, they (the PPP) gave us the feral blast,” he added.
‘What would the PPP have done?’
Comparing the two governments’ - APNU+AFC and the PPP - responses to critique, Ramjattan declared that his government is demonstrative of how real leaders govern.
“As compared to them, when people were critical of them, now when people are critical against us, we go straight into an investigation and we apologise to the nation. That is how
governments must operate. Even in Canada today you know the Justin Trudeau’s party is in some crisis. What do they do? They apologised, and so that is how good governments would come around and is not what members out there feel,” he said.
He blasted the PPP for what he believes is a hypocritical position saying that party should also absorb some of the blame for the fact that the contract had to be reviewed by Cabinet as, if there was a Public Procurement Commission in place, it would not have been.
“I want you to understand this all of this could have been avoided.
If the PPP had set up the Public Procurement Commission, all of this could have avoided but the PPP in its years never set up the PPC.
Within one year we have seen it established…if the PPP had done what was the constitutional thing, this would not be happening and I hope Anand Goolsarran is going to press that argument,” he said.
“The PPP wanted, however, to have Cabinet to deal with all the contracts, to deal with them corruptly and the forensic audits which he has done for SOCU (Special Organised Crime Unit) shows this,” he asserted.