The PPP/C also drank the IMF/ World Bank Cool-Aid

Sep 14, 2024 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – The curious thing about politicians is how easily they forget their own past while presenting a revisionist history that suits the moment. Case in point, Bharrat Jagdeo—Guyana’s Vice President and former President and Minister of Finance—recently attempted to draw a distinction between the structural adjustment programme implemented under the People’s National Congress (PNC) from 1989 to 1992, and the People’s Progressive Party/Civic (PPP/C) government’s own programme post-1992.

The former, he argued, was focused on stabilization and reform, while the latter, apparently, was of a different focus entirely. As the saying goes, he can tell that to the Marines.

Let’s dispense with the illusions. There was no substantial difference between the PNC’s Economic Reform Programme (ERP) and the PPP/C’s subsequent policies under Jagdeo. Both were cut from the same neoliberal cloth, woven by the IMF, World Bank, and Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).  Neo-liberalism is still the dominant economic ideology in Guyana.

The PPP/C, especially under Jagdeo’s stewardship, swallowed the bitter medicine of structural adjustment with a docility that bordered on the slavish. While the PNC’s reforms were blunt, harsh, unconscionable, and unapologetic, Jagdeo’s government dressed theirs up in rhetorical finery like “development with a human face.”

But development is, in essence, about people—it doesn’t need a face. What the PPP/C likely meant was an adjustment with a human face. In this regard, it followed the IMF playbook almost to the letter, with little deviation from the course set before by the PNC.

One need only look at the policies pursued by Jagdeo to confirm this alignment. Despite the PPP/C’s rhetoric, almost every major economic decision bore the imprint of international financial institutions. This slavish adherence to IMF prescriptions manifested itself in policies that struck at the heart of Guyana’s public service and economy. Privatization was continued vigorously under the PPP/C. They even tabled a  Privatization Policy Framework Paper.  This was no accident; it was the direct result of the PPP/C’s willingness to bow to external diktat.

Perhaps the most egregious example of this obedience was the controversial policy of “red-circling” certain public service positions. This measure, insisted upon by the IMF, was designed to limit salary increases and maintain fiscal discipline, but it came at a significant cost. Public servants, already underpaid, were told that certain positions were proscribed from enjoying salary increases. This was something that the IMF wanted just as how it insisted on a cap on salary increases.

These developments helped fuel the public service strike of 1999, one of the most bitter labor disputes in the country’s history. Perhaps if the policy of red-circling and wage restraint had been relaxed, the country could have avoided the violent actions that accompanied that strike.

The continuity between the PNC’s ERP and the PPP/C’s subsequent policies, especially under Jagdeo, is undeniable. One could argue that in the early years, Jagdeo’s lack of experience in running a country made him more reliant on the advice IMF, and World Bank, and other international financial institutions. But he would have gotten older and wiser on the job and by now should have dumped neo-liberal economics which widens rather than narrows the gap between the haves and the have-nots, and which subjects the people to the vagaries of markets and limits direct government intervention in the market.

Under Jagdeo’s leadership, the PPP/C became the poster child for neo-liberal orthodoxy. The PPP/C government would be a strong contender for the podium in any competition for the title of foremost neo-liberal acolyte in the Caribbean. The PPP/C faithfully followed the IMF’s instructions. The PPP/C’s policies, for all their talk of human development, were in practice indistinguishable from those of the very international institutions they claimed to resist.

What is most damning, however, is that the PPP/C continued this course without pause. The very adjustments that were supposed to stabilize and reform the economy have, in many ways, perpetuated the very inequalities they were meant to resolve… The legacy of these policies can be seen in the enduring struggles of the Guyanese working class, who have borne the brunt of these “reforms” without reaping the benefits.

The macroeconomic structural adjustment policies advocated by the IMF and World Bank promoted a development model centered on export-led growth, driven by natural resource extraction and foreign direct investment. This is the very model that the PPP/C had castigated prior to 1992.

In the end, Jagdeo’s attempt to distinguish his government’s policies from those of the PNC is deeply cynical. His administration, like its predecessor, drank deeply from the cup of structural adjustment, and the consequences of that choice are still being felt today.

The rhetoric of “development with a human face” was little more than a façade, a thin veneer over the hard reality of neo-liberalism. It is time to confront that reality and acknowledge that the PPP/C, under Jagdeo, was no less beholden to the dictates of the IMF and World Bank than the PNC before it. The record speaks for itself.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)

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• finance, IMF, Peeping Tom, President, World Bank

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