Sustainability and affordability

Sep 20, 2016 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

The governments of Guyana have a reputation for providing lame excuses for not paying public servants a decent wage increase. The latest excuse is a rehash of what the PPPC used to claim: that they could not afford higher wages and that higher wages cannot be sustained.
The APNU+AFC has become the PPPC. The APNU is behaving just like the PPPC when it comes to wages and salaries increases and it makes people want to question why this is happening.
The APNU+AFC had to have known the size of the government’s wage bill and the state of the economy when it promised that if it got into office it would pay significant wage increases.
It had to have known about the problems in all the agencies and the commitments that it would have been required to make. So how come now it is claiming that it cannot afford and it cannot sustain higher wage increases than that which it has proposed to the GPSU.
The government has had an increase of $3 billion in VAT taxes for the first half of the year. For the second half it will draw down another sizeable increase. So how come it is now claiming that it cannot sustain any higher increase. What is the cost of the 20% that most people were expecting from the new government?
The excuse is going to be made that the government has to bail out GUYSUCO. It has to bail out GUYSUCO?
Has the PNCR, the main party in the main coalition partner, APNU, forgotten what it did to Guysuco more than forty years ago?
Instead of allowing GUYSUCO to retain its earnings and reinvest these into the recapitalization of the sugar industry, the government drained GUYSUCO of its resources by extracting a sugar levy beginning in 1974. The sugar levy was used to finance the Budget. It was the monies that rightly should have gone back to the sugar workers and to the industry that kept the nation afloat.
In 1992, when the PPPC took office, the sugar levy was four billion dollars. The total revenues of the country, at the time, were about three times the value of the levy. And the country was hugely indebted. This gives an idea of the extent to which the sugar levy carried the whole country. If you take that sugar levy and try to calculate the net present value, the result will show that the billions that the government is now paying to keep the sugar industry afloat is not anywhere near what is owed to that industry.
It was not just the sugar levy which the sugar industry sacrificed for the nation, it was also all those lands which it was forced to give up for house lots. SARU is making lot of noise about the market value of the lands at Pradoville 2. But what about the market value of the lands which GUYSUCO gave up. If the government had to pay market rates for those lands, it would have been them rather than GUYSOCO which would have been in the red. The entire country owes GUYSUCO. So when SARU says that it wants to charge persons for paying below market rates for lands at Pardovolle 2, it should also put its periscope to the thousands of house lot owners who got subsidized land compliments of GUYSUCO.
GUYSUCO cannot be the excuse why the government cannot pay workers more. The APNU+AFC government did not come to the rescue of GUYSUCO. The rescue act had started under the PPPC. APNU+AFC were fully aware of what were the financing needs of the sugar corporation and the help that would have been required of the state.
It was the APNU which was at one stage threatening to cut the subvention that the Ramotar administration was going to pay to the sugar workers. The sugar workers had to launch a massive protest outside of the National Assembly before this move was aborted.
The APNU+AFC continue to give lame excuses as to why it cannot pay workers more. It is not much different from the PPPC in this regard which even when it was awash with revenues refused to pay significant wage increases to workers.
APNY+AFC is doing the same. What a shame! (To be continued)

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