MPS TAKE ANOTHER VACATION WHILE APNU+AFC PONDER BUYING PLANES FOR PERSONAL USE
APNU+AFC announced that Parliament will go on a hiatus for 56 days (8 weeks holiday). This is on top of Members of Parliament vacationing in August and September. It means that in 2016, MPs will have 4 months time off with pay. For MPs who are used to work just about one day per week and often with many weeks in between with no sitting, this is really grabbing money without working. Most of them work less than one month for 12 months pay.
MPs are going on another vacation at a time when sugar workers have been told they cannot get a wage increase for 2015 and with a hopeless 2016 before them and for public servants who have been told that they should not expect any meaningful salary increase. APNU+AFC stayed long enough in Parliament to impose 130 new taxes on the people. For struggling taxpayers, this is an unfair burden to ask them to carry, just so that APNU+AFC can jet-set around the world.
APNU+AFC gave themselves a huge pay increase and imposed a large increase for MPs last year, worth over a billion dollars for the 11th Parliament. Now they are also using the institution to suck blind Guyanese taxpayers by taking salaries and benefits they receive for "liming". While sugar workers, public servants and workers everywhere in Guyana will toil for wages and salaries that do not keep up with the rising standard of living, APNU+AFC is busy burdening Guyana with a jet-setting government, intent on spending money while the country limps along.
Adding salt to the wound, they take time-off to consider buying a fleet of airplanes to take jet-setting ministers wherever they want to go. Simultaneously, APNU+AFC has warned people that if the government reduces VAT, as they promised in their manifesto and on public platforms everywhere before the May 2015 General Elections, they would have to add VAT to water and electricity rates. Worse yet, the Minister of Finance has told Guyanese that if they were to require the President and others to pay income tax which every worker in Guyana has to pay, then the government will have to give the President and those others a heavy top-up of their salaries.
We have an obligation to end corporal punishment in schools, to stop the archaic practice of beating children in school and, instead of meeting to do this, we are going on a hiatus for 56 days. We have human rights obligations like updating the death penalty provision in our constitution and laws, under national and global obligations, to repeal the death penalty in Guyana. Instead of completing this assignment, and at a time when 18 prisoners lost their lives extra-judicially, we decided that our under-work MPs must get another 56 days time-off.
We need to ensure that we stop criminalizing our LGBT sisters and brothers among us; our Parliament needs to act with haste to stop denying them their human rights. We have shamelessly procrastinated for years to repeal punitive laws that deny innocent people their god-given rights and have often told them "we are working on it". How could we be working on it when we heap time-off on a bunch of MPs who already barely work?
APNU+AFC has made a total mockery of our Parliament, the Voice of the People, carrying on as if they have no obligation to the people and shamefully taking their monthly salaries without showing up to work. Even when they work, they prevent the Opposition from bringing the people's concerns to Parliament. For example, they stopped a motion on behalf of rice farmers, insisting that rice is not the business of the government, doing so at a time when they have signed a rice deal with Jamaica that stands as one of the most corrupt deals in our country. This is the same Parliament that has no time to discuss the crisis in the sugar industry, but has time to take an extended vacation, just after announcing closing Wales Sugar Estates and putting hundreds out of work.
The Parliament of every country must stand as a rock for democracy. The 11th Parliament of Guyana has descended into a prime example of authoritarianism. As Guyana catapults towards dictatorship and economic chaos, the Parliament is a good gauge of how rapid this descent into dictatorship is. It is shameless that APNU+AFC has completely morphed Parliament into a dictatorial tentacle.
Dr. Leslie Ramsammy
March 29, 2016