Reaction: Budget 2013 is vanilla coated

Mar 27, 2013 Letters

Dear Editor,
To no great surprise, Dr Ashni Singh’s latest Budget was yet more of the same – biggest budget ever rhetoric. This is just a plain vanilla tax, borrow and spend budget, with very little policy measures for the workers at the bottom of the economic ladder.
While the Minister of Finance pledges $1 billion to GUYSUCO which he said will help 18,000 sugar workers, he fails to take accountability for the state of the sugar belt. Instead, he used the cop-out to again blame the workers for “industrial relations disruption” when the facts remain that it was extremely poor and incompetent decision-making at the highest level that primarily caused the melt-down in the sugar industry.
We remember Jagdeo promising the people in October 2010 that even if he “personally has to get involved, he will get involved to ensure that it is fixed…that it’s delivering the kind of results that it should deliver”.
Well the sugar industry still is not delivering the kind of results that he promised.
After spending some $40 billion, the people are left with a factory producing at 56 per cent of its rated capacity. In normal democracies, for such massive mismanagement of people’s resources, people go to jail.
To our surprise, Minister Ramsammy confirmed in a Stabroek News article that the Chinese company “delivered what was in their contract.” Were the contractors legally bonded for a 200-ton per hour factory but got paid instead for a 350-ton per hour factory? This is tantamount to public fraud at the highest level.
So the biggest budget ever does not impress us at all; the reality is how much of this will result in real human development for the poor and the working class.
This budget is filled with numerous inconsistencies which reinforce our conviction that it is just another scheme to further defraud the nation with more massive Skeldon Sugar Factory type civil-works projects.
As an example the Minister stated that in the Caribbean sub-regions growth was “listless”. A major factor causing this listlessness, according to the Minister, is that “the service-based economies such as the tourism dependent ones are lagging behind”. Yet the Minister is advising the Government to pump over $40 billion into two tourism related projects.
The tourists are not coming to the sun, sand and blue seas of the Caribbean but they will rush to the garbage infested Kingston foreshore. Who do they think they are fooling?
In a nation where 80 per cent of its University graduates are migrating, and the government spending $56.4 billion on civil-works type projects is a struggle; what “voodoo magic” is the Minister using to increase that by over 50 per cent in 12 short months? Or are we importing Chinese engineers and workers to Guyana now by the hundreds?
Taxes collection went up by 6.2 per cent in 2012 to $118.3 billion and is expected to go up by a further 6.3 per cent to $125.7 billion. In addition to that the external debt went up some US$32 billion from 2011 to a new high of $288 billion at the end of 2012.
And we have not even added the domestic debt. To fund this $29.1 billion deficit, we can expect an increase in borrowing of some $22 billion of new cash mainly from China all contributing to our debt service cost going up; denying the future generation their fair share to the economic pie.
More of the same is not the answer for Guyana’s future. Guyana, especially those at the bottom of the economic ladder deserves better than this.
Dr Asquith Rose and Harish S. Singh

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