Ch­agua­nas May­or Faaiq Mo­hammed is ac­cus­ing Min­is­ter of Rur­al De­vel­op­ment and Lo­cal Gov­ern­ment Faris Al-Rawi of fool­ing peo­ple with re­gard to the al­lo­ca­tion of funds to the Cor­po­ra­tion.

In a state­ment he is­sued Tues­day, Mo­hammed said it was ridicu­lous of Al-Rawi to sug­gest that the Ch­agua­nas Bor­ough Cor­po­ra­tion (CBC) has mon­ey that it re­fus­es to spend on salaries.

"Noth­ing could be fur­ther from the truth! As Al-Rawi well knows, the CBC has a short­fall in Per­son­al Ex­pen­di­ture of $3,379,520.00 and an over­all short­fall of ap­prox­i­mate­ly $6 mil­lion." Mo­hammed said.

He ac­cused the gov­ern­ment of dis­crim­i­nat­ing against UNC-con­trolled cor­po­ra­tions and said Al-Rawi is well aware that the Cor­po­ra­tion has ear­marked its un­spent bal­ances on crit­i­cal work.

Among the projects he list­ed for the un­spent bal­ances were the up­grade and re­fur­bish­ment of the Ch­agua­nas Mar­ket, in­fra­struc­tur­al work to im­prove the Lakhan Kari­ah Cre­ma­tion Site, the re­build­ing of the bridge on Bridal Road, the re­build­ing of the col­lapsed bridge on Randy Carter Road, road re­pair, pest con­trol and the clear­ing of drains.

"Our farm­ers have been ter­ri­bly af­fect­ed by the re­cent floods and we are des­per­ate­ly try­ing to get them back on their feet. I chal­lenge Al-Rawi to tell the pub­lic whether he will re­lease funds for us to at­tend to these crit­i­cal works that are bad­ly need­ed. If he gives that guar­an­tee, I will be hap­py to spend the mon­ey to pay the work­ers’ salaries. It’s time to stop play­ing games with peo­ple’s liveli­hood," Mo­hammed said.