Cannot afford to lose our families, youth to a foreign land

Dear Editor,
We need to keep families and the youths in this country and cannot afford to lose them to a foreign land. The only way this can be done is by creating jobs and good-paying ones. If one was to listen to Mr David Granger during the 2015 campaign, you would have thought that he got this idea because it is he who said “I promise you jobs” and that was a message specifically targeted at the youths of Guyana. He further clarified his statement by saying, not some “hairy fairy job like cleaning gutters, but good-paying jobs”.
The evidence over the last 4 years and 6 months exposed that Mr Granger struggles with this concept of delivering on promises. In only a matter of months; not years; yes months, this is what he said to the youths who he promised these” well-paying jobs” and I quote “there is a lot of fish and chip shops now, you can sell cassava chips and sweet potatoes chips, you can sell cook-up rice and dog food”. Are you serious Mr Granger?
Then the mother of all deception and duplicity rolled off his tongue when he said to the youths of Guyana “there is no possibility that the Government can start hiring young people”. Well true to form, Mr Granger did banish the youths of this country into unemployment as the statistics reveal in the 2018 Guyana Labour Force Survey as published by the Bureau of Statistics. Rather than crafting policies to reduce youth unemployment, Mr Granger did the complete opposite pushing the nation to its worst youth unemployment crisis since 1987 (when the PNC ruled). At the end of September 2018, the youth unemployment rate was 26.4 per cent. That computes to 19,389 youths kicking bricks on the streets and that is only those youths captured by the survey. Based on my informed conversation with an expert in the Stats Bureau, this survey would not have been efficient at this task in the hinterlands of Guyana where the last reported youth unemployment rate was as high as 45 per cent.
For jobs to thrive, we must incentivise the Private Sector and keep spending under control. But clearly, this is not what Mr Granger has done. Actually, in his 4 years in office, he spent $1,300 billion. If compared to the last 4 years of the PPP/C in Government, they spent almost $425 billion less. That was money that was left in the pockets of the Private Sector to stimulate their business expansion which is what is needed to create the new jobs. Because of less Central Government expenditure under the PPP/C, more money was left in the pockets of the population and it contributed to more disposable income for the people and thus drove aggregate demand locally.
How difficult is this for Mr Granger to understand? This is elementary stuff for people like Dr Irfaan Ali who is well versed in the art and sciences of managing an economy. This basic fundamental issue exposes who is the better candidate for Guyana; who is the only candidate that can turnaround this economy and who is the only candidate that can stimulate the growth in the wealth of the nation.
Granger is not as pro-youth as he is saying he is and his record over the last 4 years and 6 months proves this. But to cement this opinion that Granger is nothing else but a wolf in sheep clothing on the pro-youth issues, let us reflect on the growth in the size of the manpower in the Central Government.
Between 2015 and 2019, the size of the Central Government staff grew by 82 per cent, most of them were contract employees over the age of 55 years and close to the PNC (the geriatric and semi-geriatric PNC cabal). So while there was a growth in the employment of these semi-retiree and retirees over these last 4 years, simultaneously, the under 40-year-olds (youths) saw over 6000 of their own become unemployable and push on to the bread line.

So who really is looking after the welfare of the future generations of this country (the youths)? Who can best make this country great if not the youths, so why is Mr Granger treating them so badly? What is his problem with the youths of Guyana? Why is he so disrespectful and contemptuous of the youths of Guyana? Is he aware that the under 40-year-olds make up 69 per cent of Guyana?

Sincerely,
Sasenarine Singh