My experience with Lelon Saul, Trevor Benn and Colvern Venture
Kaieteur News – The first person named in the caption has been dismissed as CEO of the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA). The second name is no longer the CEO of the Lands and Surveys Commission. The third person listed in the heading of this column is City Engineer Colvern Venture, who is trying to avoid being dismissed by Georgetown City Council.
For previous articles on these three gentry, two of which, thankfully, are not in public service, see my three columns – Tuesday, January 22, 2019, “Central Housing and the woman who spied at the Botanic Gardens”; Thursday, February 7, 2019, “CH&PA and the City Engineer and you know what?” and Sunday, June 30, 2019, “I’m not impressed by Trevor Benn.”
I’m having my conversation with Lelon Saul on tape so I’ll advise him to be careful how he denies what is written here before he embarrasses himself before his fellow Guyanese. A friend had told me that it had been almost a year and he had not heard of his request to run a small business where he lives in Kitty.
I tried for three weeks to talk to Saul over the phone. I went to see the then Housing Minister, Valerie Patterson. The Minister told me that she will make inquiries. He called me at my home to tell me that the license had been refused and he said a formal letter will follow. Even for the letter, I had to contact the CH&PA to have it delivered weeks after the minister asked for it.
In a heavy business district in Georgetown they told the man it was a residential area. I contacted the then Minister, Ronald Bulkan, whose CH&PA portfolio was covered. The next thing I knew, I got a call from Saul, a conversation I recorded. He admitted the man had been wrongly treated. I am not going to repeat the details here because they are in the February 7, 2019 column mentioned above. CH&PA did not correct the injustice.
I’m not going to repeat my conversation with Venture. It’s in the same Feb. 7 column cited above. What I am prepared to say is that if the City Council abolishes Venture then as a human rights activist, I will agree. Venture moved to the courts for an injunction and obtained it. So at this point the organization he works for cannot dismiss him. Assuming Venture is right, the City Council cannot terminate its employment, only the Local Government Commission can, and the court agrees, I still find the High Court’s decision strange.
I am not a lawyer but can the court prevent an organization from firing one of its employees on the grounds that the head of the organization has said publicly that he would like to dismiss the officer concerned? If that is the case, it is a strange case. I would like to think that when you receive the termination letter, then, you ask the court to reverse the decision in the letter. Let’s move to Trevor Benn.
Again, it would be unnecessary to repeat what is already contained in the column cited above in which I criticized Benn. So we come to the point of this article. Why do another piece on these guys when the same content can be read in the three columns cited above?
Here is my answer. These three men presided over very important state institutions, and I repeat – the CH&PA, the City Engineer’s Office and the Lands Commission. All three are important to the economy. All three are critical to the success of private investment. All three are vital to the development of hard-working small business and working class people who want to put a roof over their families’ heads.
This columnist’s contest, and I’m inflexible and crazy about my attitude, that these three organizations haven’t worked under APNU + AFC. You will ask me if I am dishonest to say that they acted competently under the previous PPP / C presidencies. The answer is that I am not dishonest. I agree they didn’t.
But this is why we voted in APNU + AFC, so ordinary people who build a home or want a small plot of investment land didn’t have to wait a million years before they would receive a reply. And as they waited, they had to beg the autocrats of these three organizations. As a human rights activist, I have received complaints from people who have gone through mental torture over their abuse from these three organizations. I’m glad Saul and Benn disappeared. I tell Guyana; let’s get Venture going too so that housebuilders and small business people can live happily in Guyana. They deserve.
(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of this newspaper.)