Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Min­is­ter Khadi­jah Ameen says the ac­cu­mu­la­tion of rub­bish in cer­tain ar­eas is the re­sult of the for­mer Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment ad­min­is­tra­tion di­vert­ing funds from re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions to cre­ate ad­di­tion­al Com­mu­ni­ty-Based En­vi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion and En­hance­ment Pro­gramme (CEPEP) and reaf­foresta­tion pro­gramme con­tracts.

Speak­ing with Guardian Me­dia yes­ter­day, Ameen claimed that over $100 mil­lion had been redi­rect­ed to fa­cil­i­tate the award of con­tracts.

“What we ob­served is that sev­er­al re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions had a short­fall in al­lo­ca­tion; some of them were about two weeks, some of them as much as five months short on the amount that would cov­er the scav­eng­ing ser­vices with­in the re­gions. Al­most all cor­po­ra­tions are neg­a­tive­ly im­pact­ed. What we have been do­ing is man­ag­ing fi­nances by do­ing vire­ments -trans­fer­ring mon­ey from one use to an­oth­er, and the Min­is­ter of Fi­nance has been co­op­er­at­ing with us in that process,” she said.

“Even with that, though, we would still have short­falls be­cause in the mid-year re­view, those unau­tho­rised con­tracts in CEPEP that were done just be­fore elec­tions, the ex­pan­sion of the reaf­foresta­tion pro­gramme, those two things fell un­der the Min­istry of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment, and that sucked quite a lot of our mon­ey from the mid-year re­view. How­ev­er, we are man­ag­ing with­in the al­lo­ca­tions; there are some re­gion­al cor­po­ra­tions that are re­quired to re-pri­ori­tise their work.”

Pe­nal-Debe Re­gion­al Cor­po­ra­tion (PDRC) chair­man Gow­tam Ma­haraj said the cor­po­ra­tion re­quest­ed an al­lo­ca­tion of $12.8 mil­lion for scav­eng­ing but on­ly a frac­tion of that amount was ap­proved.

“We have to look for about $3 to $4 mil­lion to foot our scav­eng­ing bill. That has put some hur­dles in the way in terms of the scav­eng­ing it­self on the out­side. The PDRC is en­sur­ing that the burgess­es do not suf­fer and has put in the in-house PDRC re­sources to back up in ar­eas where there has been some short­fall,” Ma­haraj stat­ed.

He al­so claimed the pre­vi­ous gov­ern­ment failed to pro­vide ad­e­quate fi­nan­cial al­lo­ca­tions for in­fra­struc­tur­al works to al­le­vi­ate flood­ing in re­gion.

Ma­haraj not­ed that the Min­istry of Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment had ini­tial­ly in­di­cat­ed it would man­age funds al­lo­cat­ed for projects un­der the 2023–2024 bud­get.

“That nev­er hap­pened. What fol­lowed in­stead was a memo, from the pri­or gov­ern­ment, say­ing that the monies must come out of the fol­low­ing bud­get 2024-2025. It meant that the pub­lic was robbed of any in­fra­struc­ture project in this fis­cal pe­ri­od,” Ma­haraj claimed.

At the end of June, over 300-plus con­trac­tors with the CEPEP were ter­mi­nat­ed, leav­ing an es­ti­mat­ed 10,000 work­ers with­out jobs. In ear­ly Ju­ly, con­trac­tors and work­ers with the Na­tion­al Reaf­foresta­tion and Wa­ter­shed Re­ha­bil­i­ta­tion Pro­gramme were al­so ter­mi­nat­ed, leav­ing over 4,000 peo­ple on the bread­line.