GUYANA | No country can develop without its people yet successive Budgets ignore this

GEORGETOWN, Guyana, January 15, 2024 - A National Budget is a country’s development plan centered around its resources, primarily targeting the removal of the citizenry from poverty.

The People’s Progressive Party (PPP) leadership sees the National Budget as an opportunity to transfer this nation’s wealth for personal enrichment and to political elites and cohorts by identifying and embarking on megaprojects, which include infrastructures such as roads and bridges, and more so transferring state, ancestral and cooperative lands, buildings and businesses.

While the PPP may argue it is the government’s responsibility to construct roads and bridges to facilitate movement of people and commerce, the PPP lacks the understanding that the government also has a responsibility to move persons and commerce by air and  water. 

The soon to be established ferry service with Trinidad & Tobago (T&T), Barbados and Guyana is a function of government in the absence of lands that linked the three countries and consistent with the free movement of skills and trade within the CARICOM region.

To the credit of T&T Prime Minister, Dr. Keith Rowley, he continues to build on a process established through the maintenance of Caribbean Airlines. For as much as this airline is challenged financially the T&T government keeps it afloat.

The PPP continues to demonstrate disregard that development is about people and infrastructure is merely a facilitator of.  In its dogged pursuit to rape the nation of its wealth to further the interest of a few the regime has disregarded laws to push ahead with the gas-to-shore project leaving taxpayers, current and future, with the burden of repayment, as has been done with the more than US$200 million for the white elephant Skeldon Sugar Factory.

The PPP feels emboldened by the continuous presence of the Opposition in the National Assembly which the regime uses as a façade to say to the citizenry and international financial institutions (IFIs) that its lawlessness and mismanagement of the people’s resources is acceptable.

In the absence of political disruption, the IFIs would not be concerned how the money lent to us is managed once commitment of repayment is honoured. This crucial aspect of governance escapes the attention and appropriate action of the political opposition.

No country can develop without its most vital resource, which is its people/labour, who are workers, be they past, present or future. The drop rate of our high school children is alarming but there is no studied approach to harness the decline, only cosmetic response and tomfoolery something will be done to arrest the situation, but nothing is ever meaningfully done.

The result of this is that the nation is being robbed of a potential pool of talents and skills to enhance production and productivity. This is also another form of keeping citizens in perpetual poverty, which is a violation of human rights.

For the current labour force the conditions of work for the majority violate basic human decency such as the right to collective bargaining, livable wage, proper occupational safety and health standards in the workplace, which adversely impact workers’ standard of living and that of their families.

The retired are still denied basic access to resources taken for granted in progressive societies such as free use of transportation, medications in a society that has a free health care system, and a decent pension.

On the issue of health, the prudent thing to do is to build the human and physical capacities of major and regional hospitals and clinics to respond to the needs of the society. Instead, the PPP regime is partnering with others to litter the landscape with private institutions with the aim of exploiting its own deficiencies.

Another major hindrance to development is the continuous denial of the right to free education from nursery to university as guaranteed in the Constitution of Guyana and spelt out in Article 27. This denial has hindered further educational pursuit and for those who do they are staddle with astronomical debts, which for some, is even before their first pay cheque.

A phased-in and conditional return to a right is unacceptable and today I reiterate that this right be respected immediately and unconditionally!

The trade union movement has an abiding interest in free education from nursery to university, access to public health and livable wages/salary because the workers initiated and pursued the fight for these as perquisites for quality standard of living which resulted in enshrinement in laws.

Our professionals, be they nurses, doctors, teachers, graduates and other artisans continue to flee. Their movement will deprive the nation of vital resources for development. Many are forced to flee to foreign lands where their rights could be respected and opportunities at uplifting their standard appear real.

Guyana’s only social safety net, the National Insurance Scheme (NIS) continues to be abused, denied the opportunity to be guided by actuarial studies and decisions to meet the needs of bonafide contributions.

The PPP will continue to ignore the necessity of writing off NIS’ deficit in order that the scheme could get another opportunity of becoming viable. When the scheme was established under the Forbes Burnham government and with the support of the trade union movement, the PPP rejected its formation and function. Today we must question whether that hatred still resides within its leadership given the manner in which the cabinet treats the scheme.

In this oil rich and world’s fastest growing economy this nation is haunted with half its people living in poverty, many unable to place three square meals on the table, having to decide whether to forego a meal to purchase their medications, living on wages/salaries that cannot see them through from one pay period to the next, even when they spend at the minimum on the necessities of life.

Such deprivations, transgressions and violations could only be the result of a government that does not place its people as priority in development and allocate resources accordingly.

On Monday when the National Budget is read Guyanese will be bracing themselves to hear more of the same, i.e., a greater portion of the nation’s resources allocated to infrastructural development and no real effort made to alleviate the social and economic defects in society that could ensure justice and fair play for the ordinary man, woman and child.

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