These budget cuts will likely be reversed and we’ll be back to square one

May 03, 2012 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,
After all the hysterics and antics and wailing and complaining, these budget cuts are unlikely to be long lasting. We will be right back to where we started, staring at the most incompetent bunch of politicians in the Western Hemisphere.
The opposition has publicly agreed to reverse the cuts if they are satisfied of changes and have been provided proof. It is likely that within the next six months, most of these cuts will be reversed.
Of all the cuts, the LCDS moneys are most likely to be restored. The PPP will try to sell that turnaround as due to their valiant efforts when it fact it was due to the gross ineptitude of the opposition, which will have the nightmarish image of cutting the budget only to backtrack and restore the severed funds much to the chagrin of its supporters. This is why this entire budget review process needed some sound insight, just like the budget preparation process needs sharp review.
Whichever way we look at it, this entire budget masquerade was a fiasco that exposed the shameful quality of leadership that dominates Guyana. Frankly, Guyanese people are wasting their time voting for the PPP, PNC/APNU and the AFC. They are all the same. On one hand is a trigger-happy PPP that spends with no fiscal restraint or an eye to lean governance and getting value for money spent. The PPP has behaved as if it is feeding hogs at the trough for the past 20 years. On the other hand is a trigger-happy opposition which wanted to cut for cut sake and ended up, apart from NCN and GINA, not cutting anything of lasting value that changes the way the PPP does business.
$20.9 billion cut from $192.5 billion – of which $18.3 billion for the LCDS could be restored in the coming year – is laughable cuts. When one carefully examines the opposition’s lasting cuts, they are miniscule. While NCN and GINA waste taxpayers’ money with mindless propaganda and deserved to be cut, there are many ministries with wanton waste that should have been targeted. The PPP is secretly happy with these cuts despite their moaning, for the opposition failed to touch those ministries that bleed taxpayers’ money and did not attach conditions to the expenditures.
The opposition failed to prepare for the budget by passing some form of financial accountability bill or spending review legislation to enable it to attach conditions to spending. Laziness is the cause and effect at work there. APNU is one of the laziest political parties ever constituted. The AFC tried, but its leadership is a liability. One gets the distinct impression that Ramjattan’s desire for revenge against those who kicked him out of the PPP, clouds his ability to make reasoned choices and decisions about what should really be targeted. That said, the AFC bears the least blame for the budget mess because it had the least clout.
Laziness by the PPP has been allowed a free pass due to laziness by the opposition. Any PPP budget contains a lot of useless fat. It is how the PPP feeds its supporters, friends and cronies — by contracts, whether for employment or for services and equipment. It spends taxpayers’ money like unchecked children. If the opposition took its time, asked the right questions, did its own investigations, prepared for the budget by softening up the PPP’s ability to handout the nation’s money and made clear decisions to cut, it would have done far better than this current joke.
But the PPP and the PNC/APNU will never cut where cuts are crying out to be made; the public service. Too many PPP cronies, friends and family members getting juicy contract positions and too many PNC/APNU supporters getting their daily bread from the public service. So, we end up with a monstrosity hanging around our necks like a noose.
The public service, whether contract or regular, is the laziest and most unproductive, inefficient, incompetent, mismanaged and corrupt pool of workers in this country. It sucks the blood from this nation every single day because it is a white elephant. If we are to hire public service workers from any developed nation to complete the work Guyanese public service workers perform, the public sector would shrink to around 15% of its current workforce. That is the reality of the slackness and tragedy that is consuming Guyana.
The PPP and PNC/APNU want to keep fuelling and feeding the animal for partisan political reasons. They are holding this nation back. For when they favour 20% of the workforce (public sector) which delivers far less in work, productivity, efficiency and production, they are asking the rest of society in the private sector to bail out these stragglers.
PNC/APNU must be out of its mind to demand salary increases for regular public service workers, when it failed to do its job and reduce the waste of taxpayers’ money going to fund the public sector. Look, cut the waste in the public sector and use the money saved to provide better equipment and training to those left to deliver better service, and to fund more private sector development to take up those unemployed.
The communists in Freedom House and the socialists in Congress Place must stop this waste of taxpayers’ money chasing big government and giving gravy to their supporters feasting in the public service. Both the PPP and PNC/APNU do not favour a lean, clean and efficient public service because it will result in loss of political support. No wonder the PPP and PNC/APNU came together to cut a backroom deal during the budget negotiations. There are two sets of jokers in the political arena in Guyana. I guess there must be two in every pack.
M. Maxwell

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