Latest update June 1st, 2026 12:37 AM
What caused the government to abandon the last tripartite budget committee?
Dear Editor,
On Thursday 25th April 2013 the Demerara Waves carried a news item captioned; “Gov’t agrees to tripartite budget committee”. This piece of news seems almost laughable and highly suspicious to me. Upon reading this news report, my immediate reaction was “same stunt last time”.
I recalled that President Ramotar, last time around, had decided to hold budget talks with the parliamentary opposition but all talks quickly subsided after a few meetings.
Ramotar and the PPP/C cut off talks and told Guyanese that the PPP/C has the mandate to, solely craft the nation’s budget, albeit there is a parliamentary opposition majority.
This time around, I have heard some of the same kinds of arguments coming from senior operatives in the PPP/C. So is President Ramotar serious, this time around or is he playing the same ‘mind game’?
If Ramotar and the PPP/C were serious about having the opposition involved in meaningful consultation in the nation’s budget that process would have been initiated and fostered more than a year ago, or it might not have been aborted soon after it started, in 2012.
While I want to be optimistic and feel encouraged by this apparent renewed effort by President Ramotar to do what is right, for the nation, I am reminded of his ditching of the opposition, on this same issue the last time around.
To me his position on this issue seems to be consistent with the usual PPP political strategy. One of the best assessment and description of the PPP/C’s political strategy can be found in Desmond Hoyte’s, Late Leader of the PNCR, assessment of the actions of the PPP.
According to Hoyte, the PPP/C only responds to pressure or shift their stubborn position when they feel that their backs are against the wall. Once they perceive that the pressure might be removed it’s back to ‘square one’ and the bully-pulpit becomes the PPP/C government’s platform for doing business.
Put simply, it is back to business as usual and all agreements are observed in the breach as the PPP/C resort to their, usual, confrontational politics.
I am quite sure President Ramotar is sensible enough to have realized that had he continued budget talks with the opposition Guyanese would have had a chance to see government work in their interest, and the possibility of a budget which largely speaks to the needs of the people and country might have been realized.
However, Mr. Ramotar’s action seems more like sticking to the PPP/C’s play book, after all he was the man ‘directing the shots’ out of Freedom House for the last few decades. The people will have to wait and see!
Lurlene Nestor
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