The annual expenditure to support the Cabinet – salaries; benefits; internal travels; foreign trips; overseas and local private health care expenditure; expanded bureaucracy in their offices, such as advisers, media consultants etc; entertainment allowances etc, — has conservatively increased by more than 150 percent since 2014.
In case anyone — such as the President, the Prime Minister, the Minister of the Presidency, the Minister of Finance, the new Chairman of the People’s National Congress (PNC), or any one of their sycophants — wants to dispute this, let the Auditor General or any other independent auditor give us the numbers.
For a Government that is so obsessed with commissions of inquiry (CoIs), let us appoint a CoI to look into Cabinet expenditure, the Cabinet’s expanding bureaucracy that directly supports the ministers. It is scandalous and an absolute misappropriation of the national assets.
The APNU+AFC Government is collecting enormously more revenues than any Government before. This is mainly because its operatives have increased many of the taxes people pay, and have even introduced new taxes amounting to more than 200 in number.
In 2014, the PPP Government collected $135 billion from taxes: income tax, VAT, corporation tax etc. In 2017, the APNU+AFC Government collected $196 billion. In fact, as the Leader of the Opposition has noted, APNU+AFC, in 2017, collected a whopping $60 billion more in taxes than was collected in 2014. This year, they are likely to collect more, amounting to more than $70 billion.
The Guyana Revenue Authority have already confirmed that they have, in the period ending June, collected more than $8 billion than for the same period last year. No Government has collected more taxes from our people than APNU+AFC. But are they spending it on the people? Where is the money going?
The dramatic increases in money available to this Government are not being spent on the people; not spent on support for the social welfare upliftment of the masses; but on Government operatives. It is most disconcerting to find out that of the $17 billion of extra money they collected in 2017 from the increased taxation of the people of Guyana, an astonishing $12 billion — some 71 percent — went to support the burgeoning bureaucracy. In part, the burgeoning bureaucracy results from the increase in the number of vice-presidents, the number of ministers, the expansion of various departments and agencies to create “jobs for the boys”. A part of the “jobs for the boys” fiasco is the hefty increases in salaries for contracted employees.
Only few persons are benefiting from the increased revenues. An alarming increase in salaries for contracted employees is benefiting new employees in an increasingly bloated bureaucracy comprising of mostly persons with close political connections to the PNC. They are paid super-salaries. Very little of the new money is going to support job creation and to provide safety nets for poor people. APNU+AFC had promised a reduction of contracted employees. They have shifted those with low salaries into the Public Service, and have employed family members and friends at super-salaries, with individual salaries close to and surpassing $1 million per month.
Wages and salaries of public servants, teachers, Police officers, nurses and doctors, and others have remained at or below inflation levels, and any increases have been at much lower rates than the rates of increased revenues from tax collection.
Furthermore, important areas of Government’s expenditure to improve the lives of people have either been reduced or stagnated. Cash transfers to people, benefiting the poorest in our country, have been discontinued.
The $10,000 per child “Because We Care” school programme — which was supposed to be increased by a minimum of $5,000 annually, and therefore should have been around $30,000 per child in 2018 — was selfishly dumped simply because it was a PPP programme.
The water subsidy for pensioners, to provide free water for basic domestic needs; and the annual electricity subsidy, which provided $20,000 per home-owning or renting pensioner, was also discontinued because these were PPP programmes.
Agriculture budget has been reduced by more than 10 percent since 2014. Infrastructural expenditure has been stagnant, with most of the large on-going projects — such as the various highways, the CJIA expansion and modernisation etc — being PPP-initiated projects. There has been little or no new projects.
Hypocrisy is a hallmark of this Government. They promised to collect less taxes, increase salaries and wages for public servants and sugar workers by 20 percent annually during their term in Government, increase price per bag of paddy to $9,000, and reduce the employment cost for contracted employees; but they have broken all these promises.
To spend more than 71 percent of new money on an expanding bureaucracy is not only sheer hypocrisy, but is betraying the people of Guyana; particularly the people who voted for them for the first time, only because they made those promises.