Guyana has re­fused to ac­cept the large con­sign­ment of items of­fered by T&T to help with flood re­lief ef­forts in that na­tion.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands that T&T Gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials had put to­geth­er the items in ac­cor­dance with Guyana’s re­quest through the Cari­com Sec­re­tari­at but when this coun­try made con­tact to work out the lo­gis­tics for de­liv­ery, T&T was told the items were un­nec­es­sary.

Guardian Me­dia is able to quote from a let­ter signed by Guyanese Min­is­ter of For­eign Af­fairs and In­ter­na­tion­al Co­op­er­a­tion Hugh Hilton Todd dat­ed June 18, 2021, di­rect­ed to his coun­ter­part in T&T which stat­ed that they need­ed pumps to re­move ex­cess wa­ter, but noth­ing else on the con­sign­ment list they pro­vid­ed to Cari­com.

Todd, in the let­ter, ex­pressed “the sin­cere grat­i­tude” of the Guyanese peo­ple in “the face of the se­vere flood­ing af­fect­ed re­gions on Guyana” but added that “I wish to ad­vise that the crit­i­cal items at this time is for pumps to meet the ur­gent de­mand for en­hanced drainage ca­pac­i­ty.”

“Oth­er items have oth­er­wise been ad­e­quate­ly cov­ered to date,” Todd said.

Nei­ther Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley nor For­eign Af­fairs Min­is­ter Dr Amery Browne were avail­able to com­ment and did not re­spond to calls or texts for a re­sponse.

This lat­est de­vel­op­ment comes af­ter a fis­sure of diplo­mat­ic dis­cord be­tween the two na­tions af­ter the Guyanese ad­vi­sor to the Health Min­istry Dr Leslie Ram­sam­my said that Row­ley of­fend­ed the Guyanese peo­ple when he said that they had more vac­cines for their pop­u­la­tion but had used vac­cines that did not have World Health Or­gan­i­sa­tion ap­proval.

Browne then is­sued a state­ment say­ing that the PM did noth­ing wrong.

On his week­ly wrap up of events on Wednes­day Guyana’s At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anil Nand­lall talked about the vac­cine dra­ma and said that he would not “waste time and en­er­gy” on Row­ley. He said that T&T’s was mea­sur­ing the size of its vac­cine roll­out against Caribbean coun­tries with much small­er pop­u­la­tions. At that time Nand­lall said Row­ley was be­ing ad­e­quate­ly han­dled by Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress (UNC) Anil Roberts.

On Thurs­day in an in­ter­view with Guardian Me­dia Nand­lall said that he did not mean to re-en­er­gise the stale is­sue.