If the PPP and Coalition Administrations have been responsible for our arrested development, why should we vote for them?

Apr 03, 2019 Letters

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DEAR EDITOR,

Poverty is widely defined as the state of being extremely poor, not having the socially acceptable amount of money or material goods implicitly, the inability to meet the basic needs of one’s self.
The internationally recognized definition of poverty includes severe inadequate access to food & water, housing, clothing, education and health services. To this list I add inadequate incomes. While many Guyanese escape the absolute definition of poverty, they nevertheless live a life of insufficiency characterized by an inability to meet the needs of themselves and families, a direct consequence of inadequate incomes.
But poverty and insufficiency are not accidents. Poverty itself is a prevalent phenomenon which has to be addressed by all countries through the effective management of their economies. The developed nations have successfully confronted poverty during their histories, reducing it to minor levels in their respective economies today.
Monarchial governments were replaced mainly by democratic systems where political parties emerged over time to offer citizens policies and better economic management systems which focused primarily on delivering increased welfare by promoting increased national output through investment, the creation of jobs, and the delivery of welfare and social services to meet the needs of their societies.
The commitment to increased economic activity ultimately led to strong, independent private sectors, capable of providing jobs with incomes that today could often comfortably sustain workers and their families.
Guyana’s experience has been one in which the political parties which emerged to manage our affairs after independence were more concerned with retaining power than seriously addressing the problems of insufficiency which beset our nation.
A quick review of the last thirty years of our economic history would reveal that even today, these parties embrace policies and ideas which, instead of promoting welfare growth and increasing national wealth, actually destroy welfare and exacerbate poverty levels across the country.
The PPP for example, consistently sought to undermine workers’ unions and stifle income growth necessary to lift workers across both our public and private sectors out of our depressed economic conditions, while they made themselves wealthy beyond their incomes in many instances.
Their penchant for corruption and mismanagement has been such that thousands of sugar workers are now without jobs, with their communities are sliding backwards due to higher unemployment and depressed income levels.
The PPP’s policies in the sugar industry have inevitably contributed to losses in export revenues accruing on account of the closure of sugar estates. The entire sugar industry seems about to fold, potentially adding to the destruction of thousands more jobs, incomes, with additional losses of millions of dollars in export revenues.
The rice sector also received a throttling during their term in government, as the recent cases of corruption at the national rice management and marketing institutions have alleged that as much as G$372 million have been stolen/misappropriated from rice farmers and their communities through fraud. Other instances of corruption and mismanagement of notoriety are a matter of public record, and all have contributed to the prevalent and depressed income levels nationally.
The coalition for itself, which promised so much to address workers’ depressed incomes and persistent unemployment, especially among youths, has taken a U-turn here, and actively sought to deemphasize the role of government in addressing unemployment and job creation (SN; May 08/16).
Further, while giving their ministers a fifty percent salary increase within their first year, the coalition systematically delayed and undermined unions’ efforts to improve the lives of their members, in addition to significantly destroying real incomes through increased kaleidoscopic taxation policies.
After scuttling the eventual procedure to arbitration in the stand-off between the GTU and the Ministry of Education late last year, a measure which would have brought much-needed relief for teachers and would have set a precedent of sorts for other public service workers, the GTU has to again revisit negotiations for another multi-year agreement.
Notably however, both the PPP and coalition administrations’ forfeit of billions of United States dollars in income taxes even after a ‘revised’ Exxon contract, stands as their most unforgivable act in administering the economic affairs of Guyanese.
One finds it difficult to explain this oversight on both their parts, but this is money which could have easily been used to address our pressing welfare problems in the first instance, from facilitation of a flow of funds upon which to create unemployment insurance, to increasing the benefits of pensioners, to revamping the University of Guyana’s operations, inclusive of an overhaul of wages and salaries, to providing stipends to unemployed adults and school drop-outs to assist them in improving their employment opportunities through education and training.
Tax revenues from Exxon could have been further invested in strengthening our productive capacity across all economic sectors to take advantage of the massive opportunities available in the world market. This latter activity could have led to a potentially astronomical increase in export growth and created more than enough jobs to drive income growth naturally, versus overt government intervention in the form of imposed wage floors.
The question we pose to Guyana’s workers is: if both the PPP and coalition administrations have been complicit in maintaining them and Guyana in a state of arrested development and insufficiency, where is the sense in voting for them?
Yours Faithfully,
Craig Sylvester,
Democratic National Congress

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