It is a serious shame when the President of a poor third world country acquires astonishing wealth in office

Sep 05, 2012 Letters

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Dear Editor,
The idiocies PPP acolytes utter are truly disgusting.
Minister of Labour Nanda Gopaul reportedly said during the recent corruption debates “What is wrong with a former president or a president seeking to ensure that he lives a comfortable life after his presidency? Especially because we have term limits, knowing full well that you are going to demit office, you must ensure that you look for your future. We must not go from a president to rags.”
Political office is not a bank or a gravy train. It is not there for anyone to get rich. If you don’t like the pay and the pension package as president do not run and better still, get out of politics.
Nanda Gopaul typifies the nonsensicality of the PPP. A president serves two terms maximum. That is eight years. Then he gets a pension for life. Why should a man who has destroyed a country earn an outlandish pension package after eight years of service?
In eight years, the president earns $96 million tax free. That is US $480,000 tax-free over eight years. However, Jagdeo was in power from August 11, 1999 to December 3, 2011, a period of 12 years 3 months. At $1 million per month, Jagdeo would have earned $147 million or US$735,000 tax-free during his tenure.
How could a man who likely earned this stupendous kind of income, tax-free, still want to suck this country dry? Even if this was not Jagdeo’s doing but that of his party, he never said no to this insanity. He never once uttered a single word deeming this pension package as an abomination in a country of extreme poverty that is just above calamitous Haiti in the Western Hemisphere.
Nanda Gopaul has some shamelessness to defend this absurd pension package given to a man who, if he earned $1 million per month, would have earned some $147 million of taxpayers’ money tax-free in salary as president for 12 years and 3 months.
Guyana has a GDP per capita of US $2869 at US $239.08 per month. It would take a Guyanese earning the per capita GDP of Guyana some 256 years to earn what Jagdeo would have earned in 12 years 3 months as president at $1 million per month.
This is not absurd and sickening enough for Nanda Gopaul and the PPP followers who attempt to defend the even more brazen assault on taxpayers of this nation with the Jagdeo pension package. By any measure, Jagdeo has gotten very rich sitting as president. He did not pay any taxes on his massive salary for 12 years. The PPP soup drinkers want to enrich him even more by giving him a preposterous pension package.
Bharrat Jagdeo essentially rose to riches just by sitting in the presidency and earning a tax-free salary from the people of Guyana. At 48 years, why is Jagdeo entitled to that ridiculous $3 million per month pension package? Why should the poor people of this country support a young man in the prime of his working life with contacts all over the world and good qualifications that enable him to earn a good living?
What kind of mentality is at play within the PPP to see it fit to pillage this country in this fashion with a pension package of this nature? Is it a perspective that sees Guyanese people as pliable and easily bullied? Or is it an outrageous sense of entitlement? Is it pure greed or plain disregard and disrespect to the sufferings of the majority of this nation? This pension package is no better than a leech sucking the blood of an innocent prey.
If Jagdeo is getting a pension of $3 million per month, he is getting US$180,000 per year compared to Barack Obama who will get $127,129 per year. Obama will pay taxes on his pension. Jagdeo will not. There is providing a pension for a president, and then there is this rape and pillage of the Guyanese people and nation. By no measure is Jagdeo entitled to this pension. Not in a country where old age pensioners receive an insulting $10,000 per month.
It is greed, plain and simple for any president of a backwater third world country that happens to be the second poorest in the western hemisphere to be rewarded in this rapacious fashion. Jagdeo will not go from president to rags, not with what he has earned, the pension he will receive and his lucrative job opportunities. It is the people of Guyana who will go from rags to even more rags with this kind of highway robbery in the presidential pension package passed by the PPP.
Jagdeo will go from President to Sultan with this package. The US president does not get such a pension package and he is the president of the most powerful nation on the planet. The arrogance of this package is a reflection of the mentality of those who passed it. This is all about bullyism, insolence, intimidation and entitlement.
M. Maxwell

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