Cardboard painted to look like concrete

Apr 14, 2013 APNU Column, Features / Columnists

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(Extract from the Address presented on Tuesday 9th April 2013 by Brigadier David Granger, MP, Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly, on the Motion by Dr. Ashni Kumar Singh, MP, Minister of Finance on 25th March 2013, for the Approval of the Estimates of the Public Sector and the Budget for the Financial Year 2013).

The National Assembly was presented once again with a budget that has been crafted and drafted by the People’s Progressive Party Civic administration without meaningful consultation and collaboration with the majority in this Assembly. This Budget, despite its promise – Overcoming Challenges Together: Accelerating Gains for Guyana – is exclusionary, not inclusionary. There has been no sincere ‘togetherness’ in its preparation.

This was a cardboard budget that has been painted to look like concrete. The gloss of goodies is only a thin veneer, without substance. The minority People’s Progressive Party Civic administration cannot attempt to exclude the majority side from contributing to the preparation of such an important measure as the Budget. The administration must not presume that it can continually ignore the public will. The debate showed that it was only through the contribution of the majority side that the Executive was made aware of the real situation on the ground affecting all of the people.
Guyana, under this Budget, is more likely to continue to face the same challenges for another year as it does today. The Budget did articulate some so-called ‘medium-term’ objectives (4.1) but did not provide the resources to realise its rhetoric.
What provisions are there, for example, to reactivate dormant institutions such as the Ombudsman and the Public Service Appellate Tribunal that ‘inspire confidence and provide protection’ to aggrieved citizens? What funds have been allocated to build bridges and highways from Linden to Lethem; from Bartica to Mahdia; from Annai to Achewuib?
How does the Government plan to develop a comprehensive infrastructure network? What financing has been made available to give citizens access to high quality education at the University of Guyana? What assets will be acquired to make our hinterland and coastland safe from everyday banditry and piracy to attract investors? How will this Budget provide every young person with the opportunity to find rewarding and productive employment?
The Budget raises more questions than it provides answers. The truth is that all of these dreamy promises have been on paper for the last two decades.  The nation, however, wakes up every morning to the dreary reality of crumbling roads, broken schools, an underfunded university, shaky institutions and a growing army of jobless youths. This Budget simply does not furnish the funds needed to transform its concepts into concrete achievements.
The most serious challenges facing families are the unavailability of jobs; the quality of education in primary and secondary schools and at the University of Guyana; the daily threats to human safety which include three armed robberies every day, two murders every week and 12 fatal accidents every month and the threats to public health – such as the recent deaths of three persons and affliction of over 500 in the Barima-Waini Region.
A Budget ought to be a plan, an economic plan, a financial plan.  It must be forward – not backward-looking if it is to be of any value. It must have a clear vision – a projection of what needs to be done tomorrow to solve today’s problems and the resources to achieve those objectives. It is not an exercise in accountancy and is not meant to be a treasurer’s report about assets and liabilities, revenue and expenditure. The sitting of the National Assembly is not an annual general meeting of a friendly society.
The Budget should point the economy in the direction of dynamic national transformation, marshal the people’s efforts and draw on their entrepreneurial energy to overcome those challenges together.  But public confidence in the ability of the PPPC to run the economy has slipped, slid and slumped, especially among the youth, the workers and the labour unions which represent them. The general aura of gloom of poverty and the prolonged public security crises and rising cost of living has seen support draining away from the PPPC.
Our Partnership deliberately designated 2013 as ‘The Year for Youth’ in January and the authors of this Budget did do a clever cut-and-paste job from APNU’s press statements. Apart from token allocations and superficial measures, however, it did little to address the deep-seated problems facing young people.
The underlying hope was that the Budget would take reasonable and realistic measures to encourage job creation – a task that has gone unaddressed for too long. A country that still needs to build drop-in centres for street children and night shelters for the destitute, is surely facing a social catastrophe. A country that is happy to boast of its success in seeking foreign assistance to build a ‘Centre for Rehabilitation and Re-integration’ at Onverwagt must really ‘deh bad.’ A country that is stuffing its prisons with hundreds of mainly young inmates means that we are sleepwalking into a social nightmare, not waking up to an economic dream.
We would be worse off if we ignore the impending social catastrophe which these developments foreshadow. The ranks of the destitute, the homeless, the poor and street dwellers are swelling under the burden of oppressive budgets like the one before us. The growth of this social underclass during the PPPC’s 20-year regime is a man-made catastrophe, not an act of God. Poverty can be reduced. That, however, would need the creation of a safe environment, the adoption of sensible public policies and, most of all, an inclusionary approach to governance.
Guyana is at a crossroads. The National Assembly has an obligation to design plans and strategies to overcome the economic, political and social challenges. It must forestall any folly that might prolong the nightmare of insecurity and disunity or that can lead us down the path of deeper distrust.
This cardboard Budget 2013 will have little lasting impact on education, youth employment and poverty. It must be amended if the people are to see real change in their lives. There is no way the country can move forward with such a budget that continues to disregard the needs of the most important factor in national development – the people!

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