Cut waste to pay higher salaries, link teachers’ salary increases to performance – former Finance Minister

Last Updated on Sunday, 8 September 2024, 8:45 by Writer

Former Finance Minister, Winston Jordan.

Former Finance Minister Winston Jordan on Friday recommended that government cut various types of “waste” and eventually introduce employee appraisal in order to pay teachers and other government workers increased salaries.

Mr Jordan said if waste, due to shoddy public infrastructure projects, corruption, political projects for votes, improper maintenance, waste of public monies and absence of feasibility studies, was reduced by at least 10 percent, there would be sufficient “fiscal space” to pay teachers a 20 percent increase in 2024, 15 percent in 2025 and 10 percent in 2026.

If Mr Jordan had his way, the Ministry of Education and the Guyana Teachers’ Union (GTU) would have worked on a new salary scale between 2024 to 2026 for 2027 to 2030 to have minimum salaries comparable to the Caribbean as well as a performance-based system. “During that period, also, both the ministry and the Teachers’ Union will work on the appraisal system such that increments can be given in January of the following year where th0se are due and teachers could qualify for a maximum of two increments given a set of criteria that you may put in place,” he said on KAMSTV. The Guyanese economist said that would avoid paying new teachers the same salary as longer serving teachers, and educators would no longer believe that they could “saunter in” and not teach or not be supervised.

The former Ministry of Finance Budget Director under the PPPC administration said he preferred wage and salary increases that are pegged to performance rather than across-the-board after teachers’ starting salaries are progressively increased to GY$250,000 by 2030. “You reintroduce increment so you don’t have to be talking about across-the-board salary increases every year and every year and every year…and in doing that also you remove the debunching problem,” he said. He contended that across-the-board salary increases widen the disparity.

Mr Jordan said if the minimum teachers salary is about GY$200,000, many of those who emigrated would return home because of more favourable living conditions in contrast to small annual increases in Guyana that would drive them out of the profession because the salaries would not be comparable with those in the Caribbean. He said the “half-baked and quarter-baked measures” would not dramatically “shift the needle” of mathematics performance. Instead, he recommended that there be an in-depth analysis of the problems in mathematics and English language performances.

He also said there was no need t0 increase taxes to pay higher wages and salaries, but instead the Guyana Revenue Authority (GRA) should go after the thousands of self-employed persons who were not paying income tax. He said failure to do so was putting the private sect0r at a disadvantage. In addition to the hiring of competent tax collectors, he said government needed to stop linking politics to revenue collecti0n as is the case in the agriculture sector where the People’s Progressive Party Civic (PPPC) believes is its political base and gives tax breaks, free fertiliser and other forms of support. “When revenue collection has a political connotation to it, you will never get fiscal space. You are giving everything but yet you don’t want to tax their income. You want others to pay for the services that you’re giving away free so all of that will affect your revenue profile,” he said.

The PPPC administration continues to assail the People’s National Congress Reform-led coalition of A Partnership for National Unity+Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) administration of saddling Guyanese with GY$40 billion in taxes but which were rolled back after the 2020 elections.

He accused Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo of misleading Guyanese by stating that the teachers’ salary bill has increased by almost GY$40 billion from 2020 to 2023 but did not state the impact of inflation, new positions, new categories and the employment of more teachers. “Increases can be accounted for through any number of things – promotions, addition of numbers,” he said, adding that teachers had received a larger share of the budget in 2015. Mr Jordan said teachers’ salaries must be comparable to a set of institutions here and in the Caribbean by progressive increases over a specified period.