Only when Government tighten up, are we going to lighten up!
(An excerpt of Leader and MP Khemraj Ramjattan’s Budget Speech 2013)
Our growth in the early 1990s saw levels unparalleled in this country. Our politicians, if they be honest to themselves, cannot compromise that fact. I had watched and I had expected us by virtue of growth rates of 7%, 6 1/2 % and 8% per annum in those early years and with that economic direction and trajectory, to go into the middle income bracket, nearing a Latin American and Caribbean economic heavyweight. Sad to say we were only, in a sense, seeing a mirage.
Khemraj Ramjattan
Why has that not happened, Mr. Speaker? I want to suggest that it was and will remain a problem of our politics which has got in the way! And that politics is, in a sense, dragging us down.
Politics in Guyana is deeply fragmented and makes consensus hard to come by. The perception by the community out there of us politicians is that we are scamps and thieves. We have grown ten-fold times worse in terms of accountability and transparency as against the Dr. Jagan era. As a result we are seen as deeply inefficient when not incompetent, and we are seen as most self-serving. This reality has undermined and eroded the immense authority which is associated with being accountable politicians, who would have brought a servant/exemplar status to our vocation.
This decline in quality of political leadership has occurred largely because there was a series of scandals commencing from early 2000s to this day. There were and are sweetheart deals for construction contracts and for privatisation arrangements and the granting of real-estate development-rights in exchange for very profitable consideration, and more recently including the grants of radio licences to friends and favourites, and even families, in a most outrageously deceptive manner.
Where there once was a Bookers’ Guyana, today we have the Big B’s Guyana. This kind of political leadership, with its gaze being on other things like pensions and other benefits, has lost sight of its supervision of a whole range of institutions, from the Police Force to the court systems, our public service, the NIS and GuySuCo and even the army. All of which now leave these institutions of integrity in tatters.
The political leadership of this country, rather than recognising these failures and working to restore moral order, has evaded responsibility. I want to say that Guyana’s moral universe is shrinking. Graft and greed have caused it. This has resulted in economic and political dysfunction. The PPP’s political leadership then, if I may be permitted to use this term, ‘scapegoats’ this dysfunction to the one-seat majority of the Opposition.
Yes, it blames this one-seat Opposition majority as the culprit. We have to damn that fiction, as it were, Mr. Speaker. It is not the majority Opposition that is the cause of this dysfunction. Rather it is the management and governance style of that political leadership over there, and its subordinate bureaucrats. That leadership is characterised by that management style, that governance style, which sees huge unfettered discretion, a stifling centralisation and, worse still, a staggering secrecy.
I want to give some examples of that huge discretion. I endorsed the view that Government must have discretion. It is a tool and an asset for a Government that must be made available to it. In Guyana, however, everyday, more and more, the PPP/C Government is never good at justifying its use of this discretion to constituencies affected by such decisions.
We have seen that for some time now. Remember President Jagdeo and his grant of duty-free exemptions to Queens Atlantic. What was his justification? When this grant was then criticised by an icon of industry, Dr. Yesu Persaud, he was said to be ignorant of the laws of Guyana. But Yesu was vindicated when certain laws were brought to the attention of President Jagdeo.
Indeed we had to come here to legalise an illegality. Of course, of more recent vintage is Dr. Luncheon’s justification for the grant of radio and TV licences. He justified the discretion to grant these licences to the present holders on the ground that it is in keeping with a commitment to break a monopoly. Laughable, as you may say, Mr. Speaker, but this brings tears to those who ought to have been granted, and with tears there is a vexation of the spirit. I need not tell you what that could bring.
As regards centralisation and secrecy, as two components of the management and governance style of this political leadership, I want to say this. The admixture of these two, centralisation and secrecy, has caused me to coin a term in this National Assembly called “control-freakism”.
We have some control freaks around the place. This term was wrought out of my experience of seeing how this PPP leadership, across there, loves to control everything. Even when I was a Member of the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), and sitting at that side, the control of scholarships was a regular thing to be noticed – so, too, the attendance of people at international seminars.
Moreover, the public purse it wanted and still wants to control entirely. And even the Assembly here. Everything…from apples to zebra. It controls and still wants to control the local government process. Hon. Member Mr. Ganga Persaud, you want to control the subvention amount for NDCs. You never want to enhance decentralisation which could see more people, with more ideas, making even better decisions. This is what brings on a paralysis in our country’s governance and management at every turn and at every point and whatever the forum. This is the reason why on the Access to Information Act, the Hon. Member Ms. Gail Teixeira can say – to quote her from the Stabroek News – “Information is being furnished and disseminated. Hence, there is no urgency to operationalise the Act.”
Further, it was only until Hon. Member Cathy Hughes, AFC member, asked the questions about radio licences earlier this year, that it became known that they were allocated since November, 2011. Until then that was a state secret. In somewhat similar terms that is how we knew of the Cheddi Jagan International Airport expansion project. It was only out for the first time through the Gleaner newspaper from Jamaica and then Kaieteur News reprinting it here. Even the India Times had to tell us about the big forestry investment in Guyana by an Indian entrepreneur – I think the name is Coffee Day, out of India.
There is so much more that is hidden, which, perforce in the coming days and months, will be fathomed and discerned and unearthed by this one-person majority Opposition. It will be in the interest of this country that we do that job of bringing all these sleight of hand deals to the public fore. It is for these reasons, too, why the political leadership of the PPP/C seems not to want to have the operationalisation of a Public Procurement Commission. The genuine, professional operationalisation of this Procurement Commission will be the scourge of the PPP in this the second decade of the 2000s, just as the operationalisation of the Auditor General Office under the Hoyte administration was the scourge of the PNC in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
If we the politicians love our people we must love scrutiny and we must learn to live it. We must give the people out there that charge to blow the whistle when they see corruption and cronyism. We must not do what was done to that young auditor, Pablo Singh, at NDIA. When he found certain things going wrong and put those wrongs in his internal auditor’s report he was chastised and abused. What are we going to be left with when we stifle all of these technical personnel with instructions that their reports must only be Government-friendly?
Mr. Speaker, the Government did not want us to incorporate our points into this Budget. So the reconfiguration of this 2013 Budget, which could have occurred during a more sincere dialogue process, is now not there. Therefore we have to do what we have to do to ensure that that Government across the floor comes to its senses.
Only when it starts tightening up, are we going to start lightening up.
