As the much-anticipated debate on the No-Confidence motion got underway in the National Assembly on Friday afternoon, Opposition Leader Bharrat Jagdeo took a swipe at the APNU/AFC Coalition for its failure to properly manage the country.
According to Jagdeo during his debate on the motion, which he filed against the Coalition Administration last month, if ever there was a time for a no-confidence motion to be brought against the coalition administration, it is now.
“Who does this Government manage [the country] for? It can’t be the sugar workers; it can’t be the rice farmers; it can’t be the miners; it can’t be the disciplined services, they took away their bonuses; It can’t be for teachers; it can’t be for nurses, who were promised phenomenal salaries; it can’t be for the pensioners; it can’t be for children, because from the ($10,000) grant alone, they took away $8 billion from them ($1.6 billion annually in five budgets)… it can’t be for sick people, because they have to pay more taxes on their drugs in the hospitals. So who are they managing for, but themselves?” asked Jagdeo rhetorically.
“On the other side of the ledger, you trace the extravagance – arches; big and fancy meals; one billion more for local travels; much, much more for perks and benefits… So I hope the people outside whom they mobilised… [I hope they see that] this is an elitist group, the 33 here,” Jagdeo asserted.
The Opposition Leader further commented on a series of areas in which he said Government has failed to deliver promises made during its 2015 campaign. “All of their promises they have failed to keep,” he noted, while highlighting that among those issues is the provision of jobs for young people.
“All the jobs that they told the young people about in the campaign — well, the young people have disappeared, they have disappeared from the Government and every other place; they are gone; the dinosaurs and Tyrannosaurus Rex over [on Government’s side] have all disappeared the people,” he stated.
Jagdeo posited that had such a situation existed under the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) regime, that regime would have been chastised by the PNCR-led Government for showing discrimination.
“You had the famous speech at BV (Beterverwagting), where young Afro-Guyanese kids were told, ‘If you don’t have a job, you’re lazy and you’re spending out your money at the Guinness Bar’, but under the PPP, if they didn’t have a job, it was PPP’s discrimination,” the Opposition Leader outlined.
Jagdeo said he has never seen a Government boast about not doing anything as much as the Coalition does. He declared that all they do is talk about the impending oil and gas industry when ExxonMobil, Guyana’s major explorer, came under the PPP Administration.
He then went on to talk about the many scandals within the Coalition, particularly those relating to procurement breaches – an area on which the APNU/AFC has many times lashed the PPP.
“If I talk about their scandals, I will run out of time. (Public Infrastructure Minister David) Patterson is before the Police and (Minister of Public Health) Volda (Lawrence) is constantly before the Procurement Commission; yet they talk about scandal. I can’t even list their scandals, my time will expire,” the Opposition Leader contended.
Speaking amidst loud and continuous heckling from the Government’s side during his approximately 40-minute presentation, Jagdeo posited that this reaction shows the desperation of the Government, since it could not address critical issues raised in the motion, such as corruption, high cost of living, neglect of industries, squandering of resources, and its vision for the future, among other things.
“It’s a pathetic Government that can’t even find anything to say about its tenure in office, and the sad thing is: while they can’t find anything to say….they have spent 1.3 trillion dollars of our money, borrowed 200 billion, and they have now increase taxes by $66 billion,” Jagdeo stated.
The Opposition Leader went on to outline that the APNU/AFC regime is useless for the people of Guyana. He added that the longer they are in power, the more damaging they will be for the country’s future.
