OP fallout sparked Budget cuts – Greenidge

Apr 28, 2012 News

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By Gary Eleazar

The political Opposition allowed billions of dollars in the 2012 budget to be voted on unchallenged

even though there were less than desired results from meetings at the Office of the President.
But there were still some areas that attracted budgetary cuts. These cuts followed continued failure on the part of the opposition to reach agreement with President Donald Ramotar and his team.
A Partnership for National Unity (APNU’s) point man on finances, Carl Greenidge, who was at the time responding to the fact that for the first five days, APNU and AFC never substantially challenged the expenditures said, “You are right in the sense because the opposition parties were not in a position to move on different things together. Billions of dollars went through.”
In order to substantially challenge any allocation in the Estimates for 2012, a Member of Parliament would have had to move with an official motion that had 24 hours notice.
On Monday, Greenidge submitted his notice which targeted Office of the President, Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Finance. Allocations for these budget agencies were slated for the final two days of deliberation in the Committee of Supply.
Monday’s motion by Greenidge was followed by another motion, this time by Alliance For Change (AFC) Chairman Khemraj Ramjattan. Both motions followed the breakdown of talks at Office of the President only a few hours earlier.
That round of negotiations had started on Sunday and went beyond the midnight hour.
No Agreements
Greenidge who chaired a media briefing with Lance Carberry and Volda Lawrence, also of APNU, told reporters just before the final cuts that the two parties which hold the combined majority in the House, could not agree, initially, on what expenditures to cut.
He was speaking shortly before the Combined Opposition agreed and proceeded to slash $18 B from the Low Carbon Development Programmes.
According to Greenidge, that agreeing on what to cut was supposed to have been a straight forward process. It turned out to be complicated.
Greenidge sought to explain that the manner in which the rules operate, coupled with the vague estimates, motions could open the proposer of the motion to ridicule or pave the way for inappropriate cuts, given that a figure has to be attached to the motion.
This scenario befell the AFC when it first submitted a motion to reduce the estimates for Contract Employees at three Ministries. That attracted a lively protest.
Ramjattan’s first motion had been equally opaque and according to the AFC Chairman, “caused some trouble,” for that party’s move to target the “fat cats.”

This, Greenidge said, transpired even as APNU was engaged in negotiations at Office of the President “in good faith” but the Government team led by Head of State Donald Ramotar, according to Greenidge, refused to budge on the opposition demands.
Politics: the art of the possible
This, he said, served to compound the situation further, leaving the opposition with no alternative but to slice out of the budget, what was still within reach given that by this time the estimates for the Ministries of Health, Public Works, Home Affairs, Housing and Water, and Agriculture among others, had all been approved unchallenged.
Greenidge when talking about why there was never a substantial challenge to the CJIA airport expansion $4.5B project for which APNU has vehemently criticized and called for an immediate halt, said that, “politics is the art of the possible.”
He conceded that while all of the opposition parties had intimated the ‘trimming of fat’ from the budget, “the fact is that prior to the debate on the budget and after the budget debate we had been speaking with our partners on the opposition benches to see where we could jointly engage in action to do what we did.”
He said that the decisions by APNU may not always appear logical but, “it is better to take action where you can and take it effectively than to take the action and be seen to fail in circumstances that may prejudice future action.”
Greenidge conceded also that as a result of there being no motion to challenge several of the estimates, the opposition would have been relegated to merely expressing dissatisfaction with the expenditures. “But there were other items in the Budget.”
Despite approving the billions of dollars in allocations in the first five days there still remained entities such as the Office of the President, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Ministry of Finance from where cuts could be effected.
Greenidge said that the action taken by APNU “is not simply to effect a cut in a particular item…we need a number of things done.”
He proceeded to remind media operatives of APNU’s demands for institutional changes to be made.
This institutional change that Greenidge spoke of cannot be affected by way of the estimates as was conceded by the former Finance Minister who said that “the Committee of Supply can’t make the Institutional changes.”
He reminded that issues such as pension and public servant wages were not within the power of the Opposition to address in the sense of an increase, given that the laws restrict the Opposition to only reducing an allocation.
“We couldn’t add them to the estimates but we want them done,” said Greenidge even as he underscored the fact that the budget cuts represent the first of many steps in achieving the opposition’s objectives.
“We can’t come to you and say, ‘look we have changed the budget in a way that we promised and we have worked so magnificently in the Committee of Supply’…because there are only certain things that can be done in the Committee of Supply. That is why some discussions and negotiations were necessary with government.”

 

APNUs Strategy
In revealing APNU’s strategy, Greenidge said that “the idea is that we would speak to them, draw to their attention our concerns, tell them we know what we could do and we would do it if they didn’t have the discussions with us…it’s not that we wanted to blackmail them.”

The Former Finance Minister in explaining to the media what had transpired to inform the Budget cuts, said the move was to ensure that Government understands that “both sides have power at their disposal; let us approach the problems constructively.”
He sought to emphasise that the Committee of Supply which is the mechanism to effect changes to the budget “is not the be all and end all to economic change.”
Greenidge conceded that in order to extract from the government the full package of its demands there has to be continuous engagement.

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