THE BUDGET CUTS ARE AN ANTI-JAGDEO VOTE

May 01, 2012 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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On the campaign trial, the opposition painted the government bureaucracy as being over bloated riddled with waste and rife with corruption.
It was contended that by reducing corruption alone, the monies could be found for all the things that the opposition parties were proposing, including the 20 per cent increase in wages and salaries that the AFC had promised it would give if elected to office and which it subsequently downscaled to 12 per cent..
Against the background of these charges of and especially in light of the constant references to Auditor General’s reports which the opposition claimed pointed to malfeasance, lack of transparency and accountability, it was expected that the opposition would have been combing the estimates of expenditure with a fine-teeth comb so as to reduce over- bloating, trim fat and eradicate squandermania.
One especially had expected that the capital profiles would have been sanitized to remove those allocations that would have paved the way for corruption. None of this happened.
The cuts that have been made by the opposition to the 2012 Budget were not informed by a mindset aimed at weeding out waste or corruption, nor were they intended to promote greater transparency and accountability. Their sole purpose seems to have been to punish the PPPC government, triumphantly demonstrate just who the boss is and discredit the projects developed under former President Bharrat Jagdeo.
The initial Budget laid before the National Assembly was for about $200 billion dollars. The final cuts amounted to just over $20B which means that overall the Budget was cut by a mere 10%. This certainly does not confirm to the picture that the opposition parties were painting about rampant corruption and fat within the government.
However on closer examination, $18.5 billion of the $20 billion that was cut was for an LCDS programme. This means that in reality the fat trimming that the opposition did was a mere $1.5 billion or slightly more than one per cent. Yes, slightly more than half of one per cent. The cuts did not even reach two per cent of the Budget if you take out the LCDS cuts.
Is this what the opposition has in mind when it said that it was committed to trimming the over bloated government spending? Less than two per cent of the Budget?
One would have expected that armed with the Auditor General’s reports over the past years, the opposition would have gone through the line items with a microscope and would have instituted judicious cuts to trim fat, cut wasteful expenditure and result in corrupt practices..
It was interesting that the combined opposition could find nothing in the Budget to cut from the police or the army. Very interesting indeed,, especially in the context of the big hurrah which was raised about some 90 million dollars which was supposed to be paid to the police during the elections period.
Instead, the less than two per cent cuts were aimed at the subventions of GINA and NCN, and targeted contract workers at the Office of the President. This is not trimming fat; this is revenge for past political hurt. This was vendetta politics.
On top of this, the opposition parties cut the subvention to the Ethnic Relations Commission. One of the opposition parties has in our courts challenged the constitutionality of the ERC but instead of awaiting the outcome of that verdict, the combined opposition opted to cut the Budget, effectively disabling a constitutional commission.
The biggest cuts were of course of the LCDS project and the reason advanced by the AFC is laughable. The reason given is that the monies are not yet in the country and therefore the project cannot be approved. A great deal of other monies for other projects is not yet in the country but it does not mean that they should not be approved. What a joke!
The LCDS cuts make no sense and therefore will be viewed by many as a way of getting back at the person who developed this strategy, the former President of Guyana, Bharrat Jagdeo.
It is striking that of the many projects that are contained within the Budget, the ones that came under the knife were those linked to the former President of Guyana. And this is why these cuts cannot be seen as being aimed at reducing fat, reducing corruption and avoiding waste.
The unavoidable conclusion which can be drawn from the LCDS is that the cuts were a means of getting back at former President Bharrat Jagdeo.
It is sad that this is what Budget scrutiny has come to, but even more sad that this is what an opposition with a combined majority had to resort to when its majority could have been deployed more constructively.

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