Government using budget cuts to discriminate - AFC
Alliance for Change member Gerrida Lowe has said that her party is well aware that the Government plans to send home certain workers using the reduction made to the 2012 budget as the excuse. Lowe made these statements at a recent press conference that the party held. According to Lowe, instead of ‘weeding out’ the cronies and ‘fat-cats’ from the system, the PPP/C Government is sacrificing ordinary cleaners and clerks and cutting the salaries of other rank and file employees to make a political point. She described the act as being devious.
Lowe explained that prior, during and after the 2012 Budget debate and especially during the examination of the Estimates, the AFC made it clear that they did not want to send ordinary workers home. She said that the party was targeting the ‘super-salary’ contract employees and the political dinosaurs that are paid as so-called, ‘advisors’.
She said that instead of the government sending off these political relics of the past, the Ramotar regime is turning ordinary workers into sacrificial lambs. Lowe said that any attempt to secure supplementary appropriations without the reforms called for by the collective opposition must be seen as an attempt to secure the positions of the PPP/C government cronies.
“It is clear that this present PPP regime has no interest in carrying out the necessary reforms to make government and national institutions function more efficiently. It is clear that they intend to carry on with their wanton wastage and abuse of taxpayers’ money and national resources” Lowe posited.
Further, she told the media that the AFC has been informed that a circular has been passed around to the staff of GPL informing them of daily ‘black-outs’. According to Lowe GPL has not even spent a third of its $5 billion allocation but they are already signalling daily power outages. She said it was a vile attempt to fool the people into thinking that the cut to the GPL subsidy is the cause for the company not being able to provide electricity.
She described the move as an insult to the intelligence of the Guyanese people. Further, she said that the government instead of trying to operate more efficiently and show that they can manage well, their decision is to punish the people.
She maintained that the Alliance For Change will over the course of the next few weeks be meeting with a number of locally and internationally based stakeholders, the international donor community and interest groups to update them on these situations.
“For almost two decades Guyanese have been at the mercy of the PPP/C, forced to accept whatever conditions are imposed upon them …. the Administration must realise that they cannot continue to punish the people of this country …. on November 28, 2011 the people voted to break the PPP yolk of tyranny and we will not be cowered” Lowe posited to the media.
