Budget’s buffoonery and the buffoons in Guyana

Mar 28, 2013 Features / Columnists, Freddie Kissoon

One of the most hilarious remarks on the 2013 budget was contained in a letter in KN yesterday. It was observed that Ashni Singh while pointing to the financial crisis in Caricom tourist economies has assigned more money for the tourist industry in God-forsaken Guyana. Why is Guyana a God-forsaken land?

This would entail elaborations that would fill volumes. Some quick and graphic facts are in order. Before these facts are presented, a brief note on our government’s continuing self-effacement. The private media are constantly told by the Government, its lackeys and beneficiaries that a bad press hurts Guyana.

The world will always have people who will support cruelty and oppression once the resources from the oppressors find their way onto the laps of these immoral souls. That is life. But in Guyana only a jackass would refuse to see that Guyana’s image is a tattered one because our government behaves asininely for the world to see.

How could the Guyana Government retain an official as the Director of Sports when that very man could open his mouth and speak a language that has gone out to the wider world and what came off his tongue was cruelly embarrassing? Mr. Neil Kumar told a press conference that you just don’t open a pubic pool to the population because after all people must understand that you have to shower before you enter a swimming pool.

This very man then told the Guyanese people that he understands why the ABC embassies in Guyana want local government elections, and he named the ABC countries as Argentina, Brazil and Chile. Since the later eighties most people know that in Guyana the ABC countries are America, Britain and Canada.

These lacerations to the image of Guyana are ignored by the Government and its parasitic beneficiaries but they see mischief and scandal in the reason why the press report on the negative things in Guyana. Mr. Kumar is going to remain in his job until the next general election and will continue to mistake a motor car for a tub of ice cream.

So we are putting money in tourism in God-forsaken Guyana. The same Guyana that the Canadian consular section ran from in 1980 to Trinidad and thirty years after has no intention of returning; the same Guyana that the owners of Pegasus sold off yet took the money and invested it in the Jamaican hotel industry; the same Guyana in which the Jehovah’s Witness church is selling off its properties but expanding in other Caricom territories; the same Guyana that any decent visitor will confess must have the dirtiest (not one of but the dirtiest) capital city in the world

So the 2013 budget has money for tourism but there was no specific item for the clean up of Georgetown. It is going to take a huge amount to get Georgetown to an acceptable level and money for that purpose should have been the first thing to come out of the mouth of the Finance Minister when he presented his budget.

UG’s increase is literally less than one percent which will not have any substantial positive impact at all. NIS contributions have been upped. Not to mention that outside of the budget, GWI is asking for an increase in tariffs. There was no salary increase for the working people.

VAT was not lowered and it brings back memories of the amazing words that came out of the mouth of the very Finance Minister in Parliament last year when he rejected the decrease in VAT. He said lowering VAT will not be of benefit to the poor and less endowed strata because the baskets of goods they buy are already zero rated. What a manifestation of buffoonery.

Poor people use pressing irons, radios, televisions, cell phones.

They buy lunch-kits for their children; they buy ground provisions to eat. At the time of writing, a pound of plantains is $200. Do you know that outside of a normal loaf of sliced bread, all, I repeat all sweet cakes carry VAT? The list includes tennis rolls, sugar tops, coconut rolls.

If you buy sugar cake (Nigel’s sell a nice sugar cake), it carries VAT. For Ashni Singh, once poor people buy their oil, bread and sugar, what more do they want?

Sorry if I violate political correctness by using the word, midget (forgive me this one time please but I need to use it) but the 2013 budget is a midget. It is short on achievements, short on generosity for the poorer classes, short on vision, short on transformational ideas. The opposition should vote it down.