The PPP in office was a success story

Sep 30, 2017 Letters

Dear Editor,
In his 1993 Budget speech, the Senior Minister of Finance, the Hon Asgar Ally described the hopelessness that the PPP inherited from the PNC after the 1992 general election, “The task we have inherited can be compared with that of a man who is required to climb a mountain with both his hands and feet tied and a heavy haversack on his back.”
One year earlier, during his 1992 Budget speech, the Hon Carl Greenidge, who served as Guyana’s Minister of Finance under successive PNC administrations for nine years, 1983 to 1992, described the imbalances facing the domestic economy as “high and rising levels of inflation; extreme and damaging exchange rate volatility; the loss of foreign exchange reserves; a growing gap between the official and parallel market rates for foreign exchange, and an increasingly virulent and ubiquitous parallel market; and declining investment, production and job opportunities”.
And one year before that, in his 1991 Budget speech, Greenidge described the Guyana domestic economy as facing “two fundamental problems… severe fiscal imbalance and severe external disequilibrium… there was also uneven economic growth and a decline in GDP”. In a letter, “The APNU+AFC inherited a Guyana that was completely decayed” (KN, Sept 24), Jerrick Rutherford asked that I use ‘accurate facts and statistics’.
While my letters are always fact-based, the statistics given below also allows me the opportunity to debunk the newly appointed PNC Propaganda Minister, Anna Ally who shamelessly propagates that Guyana experienced “an unprecedented nation-building effort [sic] in every aspect of human endeavour” under successive PNC Administrations from 1964 to 1992, and that all of the major housing schemes, arterial roads, drainage and irrigation schemes were built while the PNC was in government. I invite both the Hon Minister Ally and Mr Rutherford to read the 1992 World Bank financial report.
Minister Amna Ally should also explain to the Nation, the failure of the PNC to ‘feed, house and clothe the nation by 1976’, a promise that was made by the late Forbes Burnham; had it not been for the PPP, over 100,000 Guyanese would not have been landowners or homeowners today. But like its predecessor, the APNU can never be trusted to keep the promises made to the Guyanese people.
Well, here are some more facts and statistics to illustrate just how bankrupt the Guyana economy was when the PPP took office in 1992, so that Minister Ally can refresh her failing memory, and Rutherford can compare that with the robust economy that the APNU+AFC coalition inherited in 2015 from the PPP/C. During the period 1984 to 1992 under the PNC, the Guyana dollar depreciated from G$3 to US$1 to G$125, an increase of over 4,000 percent.
In 1992, the PNC, of which, HE President David Granger, Carl Greenidge and Anna Ally wereall a part of, left the newly elected Jagan Administration and the people of Guyana, heavily in debt; from US$60.8 million in external debt in 1964, to a whopping US$2.1 billion when the PNC left office in October 1992. As a consequence of imprudent economic and borrowing policies of successive PNC Administrations, the economy could not generate the resources necessary to service the external debts. And in 1985, Guyana became ineligible to access the resources of the International Financial Institutions, notably the World Bank; the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB).
During 27 years of the PNC, Guyana was the only country that reflected a zero per capita income growth. By comparison, Barbados per capita growth was 1100%; Trinidad 400%; and Jamaica 260%. In fact even Haiti, which was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, performed better than Guyana. Haiti’s per capita income grew 400% compared to Guyana’s zero.
The Guyana economy was indeed in a perilous state, and in general, the country’s infrastructure was in a state of disrepair. This is what the PPP inherited.
Now let us examine where we came from, and what the APNU+AFC coalition is doing to put us back there. From a bankrupt economy inherited from the PNC in 1992, the PPP/C, under the stewardship of the financial wizard, Bharrat Jagdeo and later Dr Ashni Singh, was able to miraculously transform the Guyana economy, leaving a whopping US$670 million in Foreign Exchange Reserves for the newly elected APNU+AFC Government in May of 2015. I will follow up my analysis with another letter.
Harry Gill, MP, PPP

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