Winston Jordan’s claims of discrimination in subsidies is race-baiting – PPP official

Last Updated on Saturday, 14 September 2024, 9:33 by Denis Chabrol

Former Finance Minister Winston Jordan is insisting that government’s assistance to the agriculture sector is skewed in favour of People’s Progressive Party (PPP) supporters rather than across the board, but a senior official of the governing party accused him of race-baiting and said the evidence proves otherwise.

“This $1 billion subsidy that was given last year in fertiliser subsidy was given to favour large producers in the agricultural sector, especially rice,” he said on the Wednesday morning edition of KAMSTV’s Morning Time. While he welcomed the increased rice production, he questioned whether government was prepared to collect taxes from those farmers who were earning increased incomes.

Neither Finance Minister Dr Ashni Singh nor Agriculture Minister Zulfikar Mustapha responded to requests for comment, but a senior PPP official accused Mr Jordan of seeking to “perpetuate racism”. The official said Black farmers also received fertiliser support. “We’re for farming. We’re not for Indian or Black farming,” the official said. The official said Amerindians were being encouraged to farm, a number of Afro-Guyanese groups in East Bank Demerara received almost 200 pigs. The official said the Joint Services’ tax-free bonus that was taken away by the then APNU+AFC administration costs the treasury GY$1.6 billion annually, expansion of the mainly Afro-Guyanese community of Amelia’s Ward in Linden, and the more than GY$6 billion annual electricity subsidy to Linden.

In 2012, the then David Granger-led opposition had lent parliamentary support to the PPPC’s plans to cut the electricity subsidy to Linden but, under internal pressure, reneged and that sparked off days of protest and the killing of several Lindeners who had been protesting on the bridge, the main artery to several interior areas.

Mr Jordan admitted that the agriculture sector was hard to tax the income but it should not be ignored completely. He restated that the PPP supporters were not being taxed although they had received subsidies, duty-free concessions, roads and drainage infrastructure, but government workers’ wages and salaries were being taxed at the source. “Because of that, the (fiscal) space was being eroded instead of being widened and allowing for proper salaries to be paid,” Mr Jordan said.

He noted that the productive companies in the agriculture sector were already expected to pay 25% corporation tax, as enacted by the APNU+AFC administration, lower than other corporate entities that pay as much as 45%.

Listing several predominantly Afro-Guyanese villages, he said definitively that small farmers in those communities did not receive fertiliser support.

In addition to fishermen and already paid-off retrenched Guyana Sugar Corporation (GUYSUCO) workers getting cash handouts, the former Finance Minister said the incumbent Irfaan Ali-led administration was also spending large sums of monies on the Amerindian communities in order to buy their votes for the next general and regional elections expected in late 2025. “This is what is happening with the Natural Resource Fund money and so on. It’s being shared out ‘duruh-duruh’ (extravagantly) in selected communities with an eye to votes next year,” Mr Jordan said.

The former Finance Minister in the David Granger-led administration also flayed the PPPC administration for injecting more than GY$100 billion into the loss-making sugar industry, whose production has plummeted to 6.700 tonnes,  rather than distributing the money to workers to allow them to get into new economic activities and training. “Instead of getting better, it is getting worse,” he said. Government has cited extreme weather patterns for the lowest recorded production.

He said if government stops spending huge amounts of money on the “limping” industry, which so far has seen a GY$10 billion cash injection for the year, there would be sufficient money to pay teachers a 20 percent salary increase that would cost GY$8 billion.

The PPP administration continues to blame the APNU+AFC coalition for shuttering several sugar estates and laying off about 7,000 workers.