The Government presents the Aruba Investment and Development Fund (AIOF) as a solution to accelerate investment in Aruba. The idea is that investment funds will no longer be lost at the end of the year, but can remain available for later. The important question is: Is the lack of money the problem, or is it the capacity to invest?
Lack of Capacity In recent years, it has become clear that the Government reserves millions of florins for investment, but many projects do not move on time. The reasons are: lack of preparation, delays with tendering (aanbesteding), lack of personnel, project management, and other administrative issues. This lack of capacity is what bottlenecks Government investments.
A New Fund Does Not Fix Capacity The new investment fund, as presented by the Government and approved by the majority in Parliament, can hold the money, but it cannot produce more engineers, architects, project managers, or technicians. It cannot make permits come out faster or accelerate procedures. These are the real problems hampering the Government of Aruba’s investments, and the new fund does not contain any solutions for these issues.
What Would Have Helped Create More Capacity? If the AVP FUTURO Government wanted to fix the problem, other types of measures would have been needed, such as:
Investing in more experienced personnel.
Strengthening project management within government.
Making the tendering process faster and more efficient.
Improving project planning.
Modernizing the government apparatus and digitalizing processes.
Strengthening the control and monitoring of projects.
These are solutions that would truly increase the capacity to execute investments.
New Law, But the Old Problem Remains Unfortunately, neither Minister Eman nor Minister Wever has explained to the People or to Parliament what they are doing to bring solutions to the lack of capacity problems. They present the new fund as a great solution, but if the main problem is a lack of capacity, the People get a new Law, but the exact same old problem remains.