THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT ALL

Oct 29, 2010 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

Make no mistake. The government is not short of money. It is awash with public funds extracted from the taxpayers of the country. Whatever the need, money can be found. Except that there are some needs that are more easily satisfied than others.
Right now there is a need for four billion dollars to mend the electricity system. Twenty years ago, having to find that sum would have led the government to some multilateral agency. Today, the government can take it out of the treasury without affecting social or economic programmes.
Four billion dollars for electricity; four billion dollars to dig a drainage outfall to the Atlantic, three billion dollars to build a road to Amaila Falls and a few billion more to spend in the drainage and irrigation sector each year.
The money will also be found for the cable link and the computers that will come from abroad. The funding for the cable will come from disposing of the people’s shares in the Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company, and the latter from the proceeds from the Norway funds. So money is not a problem and this money does not have to be repaid.
However when the issue of paying workers is raised there is always an excuse. Sugar workers are told that the corporation is in problems and cannot afford hefty wage increases. Yet the government and the corporation expect the workers’ attendance rate to improve. For eighteen years the PPP has prevaricated on the living wage, not even having the vision to at least set a benchmark to which production and productivity indicators can be indexed.
In the face of the oppressive cost of living, workers are sold the same old story about increasing wages spiraling inflation. This was what was said also in 1999 during the public service strike. The workers were told that their demands would increase inflation, thereby eroding real wages. It never happened. For two years, the wages increased by more than 50% and there was no skyrocketing of inflation.
This time the workers are being told that they must not be short-sighted; that they must think about their children’s future. If wages are increased appreciably, it will hurt social services. Well, compare what is being asked for by the workers to what is being spent to undertake contracting workers, and a different picture emerges.
Four billion dollars will now have to be found to improve the electricity sector. This is in a country in which we are building a four-billion-dollar hotel, yet there is no stable electricity supply. Electricity is now a basic necessity for any modern country. Guyana, however, seems unable to meet its current demand. So we are building all manner of things, but there is no guarantee of a stable electricity supply.
One hundred and sixty-one million dollars is being spent to refurbish three pumping stations. What would it have cost if those three pumps had to be replaced? Close to five hundred million dollars is being spent on drainage and fortunately “dem boys” at the Drainage and Irrigation Authority (NDIA) are doing some of the work themselves so as to save costs.
The same NDIA is saving the government some one hundred and fifty million dollars by undertaking dredging works at the outfall channels. This begs two questions. If one hundred and fifty million is the savings, what is the cost of dredging these outfalls? The second question is how is it possible for the NDIA by doing the work itself to have these savings. Does this not indicate that the government is being overcharged by private contractors?
So why does the government not do all the contracting itself? Why for example did the same NDIA recently advertise for the supply of materials and supervision services for the Hope Canal and receive bids to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars? How many millions would not have been saved had they opted instead to source the material directly from the suppliers?
Workers of Guyana must understand that when it comes to this government they are secondary. What matters most is the contracting class which benefits the most from government contracts. The working class has to take consolation in the fact that they benefit from the investments in education, never mind that most of the children leaving school do so without the requisite qualifications to hold on to a decent job. Billions are being spent on education, and this is far better, we are told than raising wages because we must not be short-sighted.

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