Now that the Budget Debates are over, we can examine some of the premises behind the points made by the Government and the Opposition in terms of equity. A large chunk of the $981B Budget was dedicated to investments in infrastructure – $388 billion – and the Opposition criticised it from two angles. Firstly, while they did not disagree fundamentally that investments in infrastructure are necessary, they insisted that more ought to have been expended on social benefits, like pensions. While couched in the language of equity for the “poor”, they are therefore in agreement with the Government’s welfare programme, and differ only on the quanta allocated. This is normal, and even expected, since, when in Opposition, parties invariably adopt a populist stance, and face no blowback if matters go awry. Governments, on the other hand, must weigh the feel-good, short-term populist ploy for votes versus the longer-term imperative for sustainable development.
The other angle of criticism was also couched in terms of equity, but this time concerned the distribution of the contracts awarded. The Opposition Leader claimed, “The stark imbalance in the award of Government contracts must now be addressed to ensure a wider cross-section of Guyanese individuals and businesses can benefit as contractors. There is no denying the obvious fact that only a narrow section of the population benefits overwhelmingly from contract awards. This unacceptable situation has been allowed to continue unrestricted for too long, and has become self-perpetuating. These acts of political and ethnic discrimination in the awarding of contracts are unacceptable.”
Now, these are claims that are being bandied about, and have caused much disquiet since they are coded in language known to all Guyanese, as in claiming “racial discrimination” in the awarding of contracts. However, the Opposition Leader would know that, at both the national and regional levels, there are mechanisms in place – for instance, the Public Procurement Commission – that have Opposition members on board, and they are supposed to be scrutinising the performance of bodies like the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB). Rather than making broad, generalised claims, they should be in a position to provide evidence to support their claims. One document circulating, which merely offers the ethnicity of the successful bidders, is quite disingenuous in not identifying, for instance, how many contractors of differing ethnicities submitted bids, and how qualified and competitive they were; so that any inequitable distribution could be discerned.
But the Opposition Leader also made a broader call for equity in the allocation of contracts when he implicitly called for affirmative action programmes to rectify alleged previous acts of discrimination against ethnic, religious, gender, political and social groups that are now underrepresented. These are calls that the Government is quite aware of, and have made interventions that members of such groups as individuals can seize. The key point of difference is that the Opposition have not clearly articulated the justificatory principles that underlie their calls.
For instance, in distributive systems, based on the equity principle that are based on markets as the allocative mechanisms, the goal is to reach a proportionate ratio of merit (“input”) to outcome (“output”) for each individual, and not groups per se. Depending on the allocation context, merit might be defined according to any number of factors —including effort, motivation, industriousness, talent, or ability – all individual, and not group attributes. Outcome, in turn, could refer to any form of reward relevant to the context, such as wages and salaries, entrance into an organisation, or social recognition.
In contradistinction, during the pre- and post-Independence era, both the PNC and PPP agreed on the Marxist distributive principles that stressed equality and need. For socialism: “From each according to his ability; to each according to his contribution”, and for communism, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need”. These were not group-specific, and their disagreement on specifics was grounded in those principles that have now been shown to be invalid in the early stage of development. Even communist China accepts that.
