OPINION: The 2024 budget: the oppression of Guyanese now even more pronounced

Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 January 2024, 17:58 by Denis Chabrol

By GHK Lall

The PPP Government promised Guyanese that the 2024 budget would have something in it for them.  It did.  But one needs a high-powered magnifying instrument to detect what is there for the poor and the vulnerable, and those who are most in need of a helping hand, in today’s Guyana.  It is a skyrocketing cost-of-living environment that has beaten the weak and the shorthanded into the ground.  The expectations were that the PPP Government would be on the generous side this time around in the 2024 budget, given that it has all this money under its control.  Given that the debt ceiling is going to have to be raised.  Given that a billion or so of American collars is planned to be withdrawn from the Natural Resources Fund.

It is time for a reality check.  A harsh and punishing one, I am forced to admit, as I present my first assessment of this year’s record breaker of a budget.  It is the third, really.  Record breaker the $1.146 trillion budget definitely is.  But it is also a heartbreaker for those tens of thousands of Guyanese (most likely hundreds of thousands) who were expecting the budget to have so much in it for them.  So much by way of lifting them out of the economic mud and muck in which they have been mired for so long, and even with this grand oil bonanza flooding here, but not really touching their lives.  I regret, I am ashamed, to report that what the 2024 budget provided for expectant Guyanese is nothing more than a penny here, and a small dollar over there that buys less and less when the day comes.  Sickening and shocking, it is.

There is a steady stream of $3,000 or so budget gifts for dependent Guyanese: $3,000 more for pensioners; $3,000 more for those with physical or other limitations; $5,000 more for school children, with another $5,000 for school uniforms.  In a budget whopper that is $1.146 trillion (yes, that is right -trillion), the PPP Government and its erudite man of money, Dr. Ashni Singh, is speaking about $3,000 and $5,000 increases that is to have some bearing on the lives of over 300,000 citizens of this country.  The budget is over a trillion dollars in Guyanese money, and the best that the PPP Government can bring itself to do for the poor of Guyana is US$15 for pensioners and the disabled, and US$25 for schoolchildren.  In another writing, I noted that the provisions for Guyanese on the wrong side of the economic scale is 6.1% of the budget.  Though I am still to sift down to the nitty gritty of the trillion-dollar budget, I am sure that the builders and others in the corrupt cabal class are going to have a feast all year round, since they are poised to drown in billions upon billions.  The tender board people are not going to know what to do with themselves; and some of the procurement check and balance folks will sink deeper into the myopic and paralytic, where their duties are concerned.

I take a bow to the extension of fuel and freight relief.  Yet when I cast a glance at the increase in tax threshold, and the NIS pension provisions, I observe a government that is stingy to the point of dealing in a nickel and dime manner, in an economy that is registering statistics at an out of this world level.  The PPP Government is all energy and enthusiasm when it comes to roads and bridges, when it is physical infrastructure that is involved.  On the other hand, when it is flesh and blood people, citizens of this most watched oil paradise on the planet, there is the skimpy and scanty and soggy that is handed out to them.  When there is the unprecedented of a greater than trillion-dollar budget, and there is the meagerness of $3,000 and $5,000 and $15,000 more for pensions, schoolchildren, and tax thresholds respectively, then it is reasonable to think (extrapolate) that with a possible two trillion-dollar budget next year that all that small Guyanese can expect is $6,000 here, and similar paltriness in other vital areas of basic daily existence.  The government thinks itself so smart that it is now talking about “couples” as part of its calculations.  The government doubles collections, declares itself very pleased that couples are well-equipped to live well.  Somebody is either a damn fool, or they take me for one.

Make no mistake, the national budget is rich with numbers, but it is impoverished in imagination and vision.  Just look at those provisions for the poor of Guyana.  It was the President who himself said that ‘cash handouts’ are not the way, and there it is again with the $40,000 ($5,000 more) for the children.  There is the best reasons for persisting with envelopes of cash, for it is a bottomless pit of self-help and the other skullduggeries that only governments are capable of participating in, overseeing.  I foresee that the $7 billion set aside for special situations will follow the same practice.  Cash is where the call of corruption commands the most customers.  I really thought that the PPP Government would break out of the cash mold.  That it would, at least, try to give the appearance of a compassionate administration, and one working towards being a clean one.  That it would have a tight structure, and respected channels (the GRA), through which to furnish relief for Guyanese.  Clearly, the thought has to be canned on all counts.

Last, in another writing I stated that national budgets have become a tool of oppression, as meted out to the most vulnerable in Guyana.  Simply look at the budget for this year, and there is the proof.  How does $3,000 and $5,000 dollars ever feature in a budget package that is over a trillion dollars?  What could be said of the caliber, the honesty, the morality, of a government that comes up with a repugnance like this?  Where in the world are there people who conceive of such repulsiveness ever to be found, other than in Guyana?  And this PPP Government that is a capital crime on this country.  Based on the numbers of the 2024 budget alone, it is anyone’s guess about how many Guyanese are going to make it to the next budget.