I just saw the letter sent by member of the opposition Miguel Mansur, on October 24th, when it was carried by a Dutch publication, and I asked him for a copy published yesterday.
So, you know: “It is with great dismay that we observed the Rijksministerraad’s decision on October 21, 2022 not to take action on the recommendation of the CAft with respect to an aanwijzing for Aruba regarding the 2022 budget.”
Mansur pushed some good buttons in his wonderfully worded letter, and the Dutch commission for Kingdom affairs has requested a copy of the Secretary of State’s response, to Mansur.
The Dutch elections last year, resulted in a new Secretary of State, a feel-good, politically-correct, easy consensus seeking politician, which propelled Mansur to state: “We miss the results-oriented approach of the former State Secretary, Raymond Knops.”
Aruba was left to its own devices thanks to Dutch internal politics currently in a state of flux.
One of my friends explains: While Rutte remained Prime Minister his base is changing, his party is pulling more on him to go further to the right instead of leaning with the center and the left. Much has to do with the immigrant situations in the Netherlands, but also changes brought about by recent climate-change mitigation measures, that have taken a relative bigger toll on poorer demographics.
While before the Dutch actively cared about their overseas kingdom partners, they now opt to tolerate Aruba’s terrible financial country management, because of their own internal turmoil.
That tolerance may in time evolve into indifference, and the “I don’t care anymore” attitude, would be dangerous for us.
When Raymond Knops was State Secretary, he delivered a constructive framework to fix our financial mess. But then the new Secretary of State Van Huffelen shied away, and as a result the entire landspakket exercise can now be used as toilet paper.
This means local responsibility to recover our finances is the only real path we have.
If we look at Bonaire, which is now 100% Dutch, we see local finances still in a mess, but also infrastructural services, namely roads, in complete shambles and there is no sign of goodwill to structurally fix this, from inside.
To conclude: The state of our roads is the symptom of our country management; much lacking structural maintenance, technically bad engineering and construction, and zero transparency. What does one km road maintenance cost? What does one km new road cost us? How much do we actually spend on these two items and how much is earned? Does anybody know? If we cannot produce this data, nobody is watching and ergo we have zero management and accountability. This is no rocket science. You have to want to manage public funds.
You need goodwill, and there is none here!!
I wish that regardless of Dutch politics and oversight and criticism, we could start with the basics. Proper management of what we have, proper reporting, honest handling, and overall transparency about where our public funds are going.
As Mansur concludes: The failure to follow the CAft’s recommendation has jeopardized, if not made impossible, Aruba’s ability to produce a surplus of 1% in 2023. The Rijksministerraad has permitted the Government of Aruba to utilize a windfall resulting mostly from higher receipts attributed to inflation, in lieu of meaningful structural decreases in expenditure. The untenable arguments of the Aruban government should not have prevailed, despite any alleged lobbying by our unelected Governor, who himself is sourced from deeply divisive partisan politics. Rewarding the Government of Aruba for making irresponsible and superficial decisions instead of carrying out structural reforms that address core issues is an abdication of the Rijksministerraad’s responsibility to ensure good governance, upon which we are dependent to achieve change.
The decision of the Rijksministerraad on October 21, 2022 will without question lead to the further deterioration of Aruba’s already precarious financial position. Under no circumstances can this be considered a positive achievement. On the contrary, this will indisputably lead to more difficult circumstances for the Aruban people and make the path back to sustainable public finances more challenging.
