Making PPP ‘look bad’ at cost of Guyanese will backfire – Jagdeo warns
Written by Weekend Mirror
CONCERNS about Guyana’s ability have been expressed by President David Granger, who commented on the Venezuela factor as a deterrent to foreign investors. However, Opposition Leader, Dr. Bharrat Jagdeo, however contends that the current A Partnership for National Unity and Alliance For Change (APNU+AFC) administration needs to also look internally for investor deterrents.
At his last news conference, held last Friday at Freedom House, he warned that the Government risks having banks and insurance companies increase their interest rates and premiums, in addition to political risk costs, by sounding some of the rhetoric that is being uttered.
“It is so silly…you are harming the future of the country with things that are not facts to make the PPP look bad,” he said.
Jagdeo charged that comments about Guyana being bankrupt, when the state of the economy and state finances were sound up to the time his party, the former People’s Progressive Party/ Civic (PPP/C) left office in May this year.
The Opposition Leader questioned that if the former PPP/C administration squandered all of state resources, how was it that Finance Minister Winston Jordan presented a bigger budget in 2015 over 2014.
“They have a bigger budget. I would have expected, since about 30 per cent of it is fraud, which is the money that the PPP would steal in the Budget as estimated by (Anand) Goolsarran, that they would have cut the budget by 30 per cent, because they are not going to steal. Either they were lying about is or they put $40B in the budget to steal,” he had said at a prior news conference.
According to him, similar comments about rampant corruption, when the several forensic audits have still to lay blame for mismanagement of the economy at the feet of the Party’s leadership, can make the situation in Guyana worse.
Jagdeo, former president and finance minister, had waded into the current administration during the 2015 Budget debates in August for not advancing a coherent plan for the economy’s success and, by extension, improved livelihoods for the Guyanese people.
Jagdeo had similar comments about the APNU+AFC manifesto, saying that it is “unimaginative, perfunctory, has no strategic clarity and it is sometimes contradictory in its policy prescriptions.”
He said he believes as much as 75% of the document is “arbitrary ad hoc extraction of policies” that the PPP/C was already pursuing, but without the strategic framework that our government has outlined in several public documents.
On the campaign trail, he said, “You know what’s gonna happen, I predict that if they were to win, we will have the exchange rate going to G$500 to US$1, they will eat up all the money that we have in the Central Bank, because that’s their way of doing things.”
Jagdeo added, “They will eat it up; the interest rates are going to skyrocket again. Then you will have a mass exodus like in the past from this country.”
The latter he contends remains a concern and Jagdeo maintains that an increase in private investment, private consumption, government spending, and net exports equals an better Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
