You must already know that last week a significant number of intelligent people congregated in the ballroom of the Hilton Aruba Caribbean Resort & Casino for a three day symposium regarding Good Governance and the lack thereof on the island, for the past 31 year, since Status Aparte.
It would be difficult to summarize the 9 interactive lectures given over the span of 3 days, but some things stand out mostly the interesting findings of Armand Hessels, who took it upon himself to actually read the reports generated by government agencies, over 2,000 pages in small print.
One of the slides which was the most painful to digest in his power point presentation was one regarding the DECREASED funding for social organizations.
Apparently because the Dutch imposed financial sobriety, enforced by CAFT supervision, the island could no longer borrow money on the international markets, no more loans, so it turned on its own budget items and cannibalized them, taking chunks out of the education budget, the social affair budget, the health budget, the justice budget, the infrastructure budget, plus imposing higher taxes.
Example: Social organizations received Fls. 122.234.600 in 2014, 82.825.600 in 2015 and, and just 52.878.000 in 2016, that’s a total of 43% of what they got in 2014.
It means that in order to finance its extravagant spending, including the election campaign, social organization will get even less, this year.
Consequently, we have kids who go to school hungry, kids who don’t have glasses to see what’s scribbled on the blackboard, yes, we still use blackboards, our elderly survive on a shoe string budget in barrack-like homes, and there is no money in the contingency fund, in the event of a natural god forbid, disaster. Our MinPres flew to Sint Maarten to offer encouragements – think a two-day private-plane charter, plus expenses, entourage and social media specialists, $30.000 out of our pocket?! — it got him in the limelight for 20 seconds, but in reality he cannot do anything to ease these people’s suffering and pain, acting like Superman was just a photo opportunity.
And all the funds wasted by all parties on ridiculous parades – think Fls 50 per car in gasoline – could have been sent to Sint Maarten as our relief contribution, or put toward a new middle and high school in Noord, so hundreds of kids get a chance at an education.
