Jagdeo’s defence of 8% pay hike

Dec 09, 2022 Editorial

Kaieteur News – Vice President Bharat Jagdeo must be commended for his version of what is caring and compassionate. It has to do with the recently announced 8% pay raise for public servants.

The fact that the Vice President actually spared the time to shed some additional light behind the 8% pay increase is itself a major development. We hope that it is of things to come, such as his authorising the release of concealed mining contracts, and those oil reports kept from Guyanese.

On the 8% pay move, Dr. Jagdeo asserted that it cannot be viewed in isolation, but other factors must be considered, and they all make the 8% raise for public servants much better than it looks. He pointed to what the APNU+AFC Coalition did with taxes, and how it drained people’s pockets (including Public Servants), and which the PPP/C Government helped to undo to the tune of GY$40B. It is factual a hefty sum. What Dr. Jagdeo conveniently left out is how much of the different tax eases actually touched the pockets of Public Servants and whether they made any material impact. The minimal resulted for public servants.

Further, Vice President Jagdeo mentioned this country’s ‘huge fiscal deficit’ which is real. We agree that there is such a deficit. But we also note that billions in new debt have been incurred by his own PPP/C Government, some believe according to his commands, in the last two years, and with the national debt ceiling raised to accommodate still more borrowing. This bingeing on debt like credit unconscious consumers contributed heavily to the ‘huge fiscal deficit’. Moreover, we steer Dr. Jagdeo to where he wishes to avoid. A significant percentage of the nation’s debt is channeled to a slew of infrastructure projects. These projects are mostly in the hundreds of millions individually and, in aggregate, many billions.

While the PPP/C Government approved infrastructure projects race ahead on steroids, Guyanese still have to exist day to day and, too often, paycheck to paycheck. The problem with the monthly paychecks of Public Servants is that they are falling well short of what is required for a decent life. They still have to feed their families, clothe them, and house them, with those expenses being only the beginning. Neither Public Servants nor any other citizen at the bottom of the economic stairway have yet perfected the art of eating infrastructure, or clothing themselves and their families with bricks or steel or wood.

Also, we acknowledge Vice President Jagdeo’s accuracy in identifying that oil income is on the modest side. What we have difficulty with is his sustained obstinacy towards bringing ExxonMobil to the discussion table and squeezing some financial concessions out of it. The new Production Sharing Agreement (PSA) terms that he unveiled, and to be made official, should apply to the oil projects in the Stabroek Block waiting for the PPP/C Government’s greenlight. Simply put, Dr. Jagdeo’s approval. He has it in his hands to make that difference by extracting the royalty and taxation rates in his new PSA and the Vice President knows in his head, how much that would contribute to the oil monies that Guyana earn moving from modest to the more meaningful.

With that in mind, Dr. Jagdeo is enlightened enough to know how much more cash his Government can put into the hands of poor Guyanese, not just public servants. More billions would be available to give to all those struggling communities he mentioned, all those programs that have happened. Now that we heard from Dr. Jagdeo, and we thank him, about how much his Government has done for Guyanese, and how much more than 8%, in reality, Public Servant received, our bottom line is that it is not enough. More is needed, more can be done. He must rebalance his hand and go after ExxonMobil using different strategies (approvals), for more, so that more can be given to hurting and hungry Guyanese. The PPP/C Government should focus more on people, and less on public works, which disguises many trickeries. Finally, as much as Dr. Jagdeo may not have said so, but wish it, 8% is not 80%, maybe not even 18% all told, considering eases from his Government.