Making the private sector the scapegoat

Aug 19, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

Kaieteur News – If you want to know why the APNU+AFC coalition government of 2015-2020 collapsed in on itself, don’t look to the private sector. The private sector was too busy trying to survive to have the time to sabotage the economy.

Now desperate to find a scapegoat for poor fiscal policies during the APNU+AFC period, the APNU now insists it was sabotage by the private sector that forced them to raise taxes and fees. Sabotage! As if the private sector was running around in trench coats, loosening screws on filing cabinets at the Ministry of Finance.

The APNU is reported to have claimed that it was the private sector that shut down the economic activities in this country during the APNU+AFC government. This is typical PNCR excuse-making.  The problem with every PNC-affiliated government is not sabotage. It’s not a hostile private sector. It’s not even foreign agents. The problem is their undying love affair with the non-productive public sector. A love so deep, so torrid, so passionate that it would make Satan cry. Every time the PNC touches power, the government payroll balloons like a party gone wrong. And as we all know, balloons eventually pop—or, in this case, tax the nation until everybody feels faint.

Which brings me to one of the most tragicomic stories in Guyana’s bureaucratic history.  In the 1980s, the economy was in ruins, IMF officials were circling like hawks, and it was the IMF and World Bank that forced the government to retrench thousands of workers.

The story is told of one poor secretary who was dutifully typing up her ministry’s retrenchment list. She typed name after name after name. Until suddenly, she fainted. Why? Her own name was on the list. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, she was literally typing herself out of a job.

That was Burnham’s Guyana. The IMF and World Bank said, “Retrench thousands.” And like obedient pupils, the government did just that, sending thousands to the breadline, proving that efficiency was not their strong suit.  It is estimated that between 1980 and 1983, some 24,000 public sector workers were retrenched.

You would think APNU+AFC would learn from this historical fiasco. But no. Fast forward to 2015, and instead started hiring. Not a few here and there—no, no. They hired like Noah loading animals into the Ark. By the time the storm was over, the central government workforce had swelled to 26,354, an increase of 76.8 percent.

Meanwhile, GuySuCo workers, the poor sugar workers, were retrenched in thousands. Non-central government employment shrank by more than 40 percent while central government employment was bloated. This was not nation-building. This was payroll-building. Professor Tarron Khemraj analyzed the government’s overdraft at the Bank of Guyana. He found that when the PPP left office in 2014, the overdraft was G$9.3 billion. Painful, yes, but survivable. By August 2020, when APNU+AFC handed over the keys, the overdraft was G$92.8 billion. That’s not an overdraft. That’s a mortgage on your grandchildren’s lunch money.

Now, when confronted with the pain that they increased taxes, instead of admitting that they hired too many people, instead of conceding that their payroll was bloated, they instead look for a scapegoat. And who better to make the scapegoat than the private sector. They claim the private sector sabotaged them, forcing them to widen and raise taxes and fees. The private sector! The same sector that kept the economy growing during that period. The same sector that somehow manages to generate employment without hiring a cousin, an uncle, and three school friends for every desk job.

Let’s be clear. It was not sabotage that led to the tax increases. It was the sheer gravitational pull of a government payroll expanding at the speed of gossip. When you go from 14,905 central government employees in 2014 to 26,354 by 2018, somebody has to pay. And guess who that somebody was? You, me, the man selling plantain chips on the roadside.

APNU+AFC blaming the private sector is like blaming the mirror because your pants don’t fit. The truth is simple: the coalition government taxed because it spent, and it spent because it hired, and it hired because every PNC-led administration seems to believe that nation-building is best achieved by distributing pay slips like confetti.

So, the next time APNU whines about private-sector sabotage, remember the secretary in the 1980s who fainted while typing her own name on the retrenchment list. If irony were edible, she wouldn’t have needed the breadline. The lesson is eternal.  Economies don’t collapse because the private sector sabotages them. They collapse because governments sabotage themselves—with bloated bureaucracies, overdrafts masquerading as budgets, and the desperate illusion that more employees equal more productivity.

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

---

• AFC, APNU, Peeping Tom, Private Sector, scapegoat

---