Your Eyewitness is writing this piece early on Friday morning – looong before the Finance Minister actually reads out his Budget Speech in its entirety. He knows this is tradition and all that, but the said tradition started out in 1733, when PM Walpole for the first time opened his BUDGE (briefcase, hence “Budget!”) in Parliament to suggest imposing excise taxes. Didn’t take more than a few minutes, but the uproar made him withdraw his suggestion while leaving us with a new word: Budget – suggesting revealing something hidden – and a new Parliamentary tradition!!
Well, after years of Budgets during the Burnham years – when folks waited anxiously to hear about new taxes and new bans – nowadays, the Govt’s expected to deliver goodies to the people by putting and leaving more money in their pockets!! Excepting, of course, when the PNC returned between 2016 and 2020 under Granger – and plunged into an orgy of taxing businesses and ordinary folks!! Returning to roots and all that, one suspects!!
Now, your Eyewitness won’t dare predict how much the Govt would propose to spend in an election year — especially when we’re now talking about TRILLIONS of dollars!! — so, he’s gonna take the road not (heavily) travelled and take a stab at what we might be doing after the world experienced the highest temperature in recorded history!! It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that Climate Change is kicking in – and kicking a55es in the process!! Your Eyewitness worries we ain’t taking things seriously enough. Look at all the hotels going up; are their owners being warned that, in a couple of decades, they could all literally become not just Atlantic “beachfront properties”, but BEACHES!??! Maybe a “climate change” tax ought to be imposed to help defray the cost of keeping out the Atlantic?? Those sea walls, rip-rap structures and boulders don’t come cheap!! Did you see recent request for bids??
But most of all, we’re happy that Pressie kicked off Silica City. Your Eyewitness has said this before, and he’ll keep on saying it till someone listens: LET’S GET IT ON!!! Cause the old people say, “Who na lissen guh feel!!”, and he has no intention of feeling the Atlantic battering his deteriorating body!! We should start by moving all the Government Ministries and a new Parliament Building to Silica City – like Brazil did with Brasilia back in the sixties.
Leaders are supposed to be leading by example – like Hoyte’s Iwokrama – and what’s better than our present leaders showing the way to our future capital? Yes…we should go the whole hog and make Silica City our administrative capital. It’ll be like the US, where New York’s the economic capital and Washington’s the political capital.
Gotta hedge our bets!!
…for Reparations
In virtue-signalling moves, several British institutions and families that had links to the African Slave Trade to the Caribbean announced they were raising funds to go towards reparations in the “spirit of reparative justice”!! Back in 2018, Glasgow University announced they’ll raise £20M to spend over the next 20 years -setting up and running the Glasgow-Caribbean Centre for Development Research in Glasgow and UWI. Have we gotten any studies from this programme to assist in our development efforts?? At a minimum, we in Guyana can check off our plans against theirs.
Then there’s the Church of England, which marched in lockstep with the slave traders and plantation owners to exploit the free labour extracted through whips and chains. In 2023, they proposed a £100 billion reparations fund, but, a year later, a committee they established proposed that they would actually need £1 billion!! Then, of course, there were the Gladstones, who not only dealt in slaves, but indentureds, and said “sorry” along with £100K!!
Who’s keeping tabs??
…for cash grants
While your Eyewitness hasn’t collected his $100,000 cash grant as yet, he’s already budgeted for it; but hasn’t revealed the (spiritous) expenditure to his better half!! Figure he gotta dust off his old briefcase – to block blows!!
