Curacao does nothing with the SEI-millions

September 18, 2008 7:44 AM

Until now, Curaçao has hardly spent one cent of the 130 million guilders that was made available for the Social Economic Initiative (SEI) projects. Rob Vermaas, the Representative of the Netherlands in the Netherlands Antilles is very concerned about this. The implementing organization has the money and nothing is being done with it.

Improvement of the social-economic situation of the population is according to Vermaas, one of the most important objectives of the political renewal that must take effect in 2010, but due to the fact that the SEI is not progressing enough, nothing has happened in Curacao until now. The SEI is a priority for 2009, says Vermaas; this is also mentioned as such in chapter IV of yesterday’s presented budget for the Kingdom in the Netherlands.

A considerable part of the SEI-projects must be implemented in 2009. “Not only because this is one of the things that the citizens are really going to notice, but also because structural economic growth of the islands is also important for balancing the islands’ budgets.” The SEI-projects include a great number of investments and expectations are that these would contribute to the structural economic growth. There will be investments in infrastructure, employment, tourism, medium- and small business, and diversification of the economy.

Even though Vermaas said yesterday in an elucidation of the Budget for the Kingdom that he knows that accepting the final declaration and also the establishment of the SEI took a little longer in Curacao, he says that projects could have been started long time ago. These projects could have made it clear that we are not just talking about matters like improvement of the economic infrastructure and better connection of the education on the labour market, but that these are also realized in practice.

It is not so that Curacao doesn’t know what to do with the SEI moneys – The BC has already presented 128 projects as part of the SEI a few months ago – but the problem is the submission of those drawn up projects with Usona. That has everything to do with a difference of opinion on where the secretariat must be established. This is probably more important than the progress of the projects and the improvement of socially-economic situations that derives from that, like state secretary Ank Bijleveld-Schouten (Kingdom Relations, CDA) also indicated during the presentation of her budget, for the people in the Antilles for whom we are doing all this. “I would like to give some encouraging words to take the SEI more energetic in hand and speed up the execution of the programs”, said Vermaas.

(Source: National Newspaper Amigoe)

17 September, 2008